Book Review – American Prometheus The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
Those who know me, know; that I do a lot of things. I travel, I cook, I write, I try to learn musical instruments (and fail spectacularly at it), and I read. My love of reading stemmed from my desire to come out of life of poverty and drudgery and Uttar Pradesh. Those three ofttimes go together, unless you are from Bihar, where it gets worse. But men and women have been known to get out of it.
Education usually helps. At least it helped me.
My book reviews are less about the book more about the impact that particular book has upon me. In my writing I often succumb to hyperbole and also sex. My formative reading was built upon two great books – Love in the Time of Cholera and One Hundred Years of Solitude.
American Prometheus had it all and palace intrigue and science and war and death, but most importantly it was about a man – a man who was worth a living lifetime just to know him. A thought that I kept to myself until David Lilenthel gushes, ‘Oppenheimer is worth living a lifetime just to know that mankind has been able to produce such a being.’
I have a strange fascination with science – especially physics, mathematics and statistics; not that I am good at it. I need not necessarily know how to play guitar to enjoy Jimi Hendrix. And naturally I get attracted to the theories, the theorists and their stories. After Oppie, yes that’s what they called him lovingly, it would be Richard Feynman for me next, and after that John von Neuman.
Less about me and more about the book – yes, it is a biography and it is about one of the most intelligent men to ever walk upon this planet – and I am talking about raw intellect and not just scientific prowess.
But the book reads like a fairly tale of romance, relationships, love, political intrigue, espionage, and of course war, death and destruction.
It could easily be magical realism and straight out of Salman Rushdie or Gabriel Garcia Marquez. But doing that would be paying huge disrespect to the authors Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. The book and the content and the stories are so painstakingly researched, it looked like a work of ten different men from ten different decades; but once I learnt that the book took the authors 25 years to write, it begun to make sense.
I shall not discuss the content of the book; it is a five parts thriller on the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Better minds than me have better things to say about this absolute banger of a book. If you were to read it or not read it, my personal opinion would not matter. Additionally, this book is about the man behind the men behind the Manhattan Project. A very complex man. Genius, and sometimes an underdog. And all along the while, human.
They say we are all products of our environment. When and where you are born shall have a bigger impact on your outcome in life than anything else you do intentionally.
Every day I see women and men with potential merely surviving and trying to make ends meet. I am not talking about the bitches of LinkedIn. {Sidenote – Bitches is gender neutral and hardly used for female dogs as it was intended to} but of everyday people who have made peace with life and lost opportunities.
Stephen Jay Gould had once remarked that he was less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
Somewhere in the reading, you realize, or at least I did that had my circumstances been different, my life would have been more useful to the world around me. Although I am truly aware and experienced with this facet of life – that no matter how bad things are, they can always get worse, and to have lived through tragedies, I know that probability of worse events happening in your lives is higher than those that transform your life for good.
Even a man born in the best of environments, in possession of the highest of intelligence and abundant finances, such as Oppenheimer was, can find himself waking up into a Kafkaesque nightmare. And he did. There are moments when troubles enter our lives and we can do nothing to avoid them. That happens to all of us and that happened to Oppie.
In the end it seemed that the man had a curse upon himself. And since we all know, or at least I did, the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, you could sense the whole book was leading up to the tragedy it turned out to be. Perhaps befitting for a man who had become death; the destroyer of the world.
PS: Somewhere in between I had started to resonate with the life of Oppie. Not that I am some genius of some kind, hardly. And it would be too conceited to equate my life with that of him; but for those moments of weaknesses that can destroy a life of promise, or the realization of the lack of opportunities or the curse of circumstances. Although I am truly grateful for the life I live and gotten to love – considering the overflowing gutter I was born next to. I could not help but feel sorry for him, and myself.