Oppenheimer: Portrait of an Enigma

The Academy Award winning motion picture Oppenheimer introduced the legendary nuclear physicist to a new generation. Oppenheimer was a puzzle to everyone. The nuclear physicist most responsible for the creation of the atomic bomb, he was a genius both scientifically and otherwise. His standards were impossibly high. He read widely in many languages, wrote poetry, and did superb science. Yet in Jeremy Bernstein’s intensely interesting biographical memoir, Oppenheimer emerges as a man unsure of his identity and captive to an element of self-destructiveness in his makeup. As a former colleague of Oppenheimer’s, Bernstein has composed a book that is both personal and historical, bringing the reader close to the life and workings of an extraordinary and controversial man. Filled with revealing insights and details that set the historical record straight, Oppenheimer is that rare quantity: a vastly entertaining study of one of the most important and enigmatic scientists of the atomic age.

Theoretical physicist and a writer on popular science, Jeremy Bernstein is a former staff writer for the New Yorker, contributor to The Atlantic Monthly, New York Review of Books, and Scientific American, among others, and author of numerous books.