Oppenheimer Review
Saturday, February 11th, 2006Not knowing anything about Oppenheimer, I thought I’d dive in with Jeremy Bernstein’s short bio, Oppenheimer: Portrait of an Enigma. With Bernstein’s credentials as a long time writer for the New Yorker, and as a physicist who knew Oppenheimer, this looked like a great intro.
I couldn’t be more wrong. Sadly, this is a poorly written, poorly edited book. Bernstein’s credentials intrude embarassingly often as he frequently inserts inconsequential and irrelevant asides with anecdotes about when he perchance met someone in the narrative. He comes across as self-aggrandizing (and without merit — ouch!).
That aside, he also writes poorly, not knowing how to organize his story, when to provide details, etc. I can’t imagine I’ve ever read a book (especially a short 200 page essay) with so many awkward forward references: “I will come back to the matter …” occurs far too many times for readibility. On the other hand, he will detour into a technical explanation of Plutonium-239 v Plutonium-240, then not use the information for any apparent purpose.
All that said, I can imagine that real students of Oppenheimer might find this interesting precisely for the odd tidbits he may offer that aren’t in any other bios or narratives of the time. Such students also will find it easier to navigate through his disorganized narrative of the hearing and so forth. More general readers should look elsewhere. I myself will be trying Brotherhood of the Bomb next.