{"product_id":"robert-oppenheimer-isbn-9780385722049","title":"Robert Oppenheimer","description":"\u003cb\u003eAn unforgettable story of discovery and unimaginable destruction and a major biography of one of America’s most brilliant—and most divisive—scientists, \u003ci\u003eRobert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center\u003c\/i\u003e vividly illuminates the man who would go down in history as “the father of the atomic bomb.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Impressive. . . . An extraordinary story.”—\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Judicious, comprehensive and reliable. . . . By far the most thorough survey yet written of Oppenheimer’s physics.\"—\u003ci\u003eWashington Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Oppenheimer’s talent and drive secured him a place in the pantheon of great physicists and carried him to the laboratories where the secrets of the universe revealed themselves. But they also led him to contribute to the development of the deadliest weapon on earth, a discovery he soon came to fear. His attempts to resist the escalation of the Cold War arms race—coupled with political leanings at odds with post-war America—led many to question his loyalties, and brought down upon him the full force of McCarthyite anti-communism. Digging deeply into Oppenheimer’s past to solve the enigma of his motivations and his complex personality, Ray Monk uncovers the extraordinary, charming, tortured man—and the remarkable mind—who fundamentally reshaped the world.“Impressive. . . . An extraordinary story.” \u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Judicious, comprehensive and reliable. . . . By far the most thorough survey yet written of Oppenheimer’s physics. . . . A convincing portrait.” \u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eWashington Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Compelling.” \u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Oppenheimer is fortunate to have been given such an exemplary biographer.” \u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eNew Scientist\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Essential reading for Oppie enthusiasts, even those who don't know a meson from a cosmic ray (and don't much care).” \u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eChicago Tribune\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[\u003ci\u003eRobert Oppenheimer\u003c\/i\u003e] feels suspiciously like the best biography I’ve ever read.” \u003cbr\u003e—Bryan Appleyard, \u003ci\u003eNew Statesman\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A masterclass in how biography, done well, gets us closer to the mindset of an age than any other kind of inquiry.” \u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eGuardian \u003c\/i\u003e(London)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Monk is a levelheaded and congenial guide to Oppenheimer’s life. . . . [His] discussion of Oppenheimer’s work in physics is one of his book’s great contributions to the saga, an area of the man’s life that previous biographies have neglected.” \u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe Daily Beast\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Monk’s book is a tour de force. . . . This will, I am sure, establish itself as the definitive biography.” \u003cbr\u003e—Lisa Jardine, \u003ci\u003eFinancial Times\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “An enigma to many of his contemporaries, Oppenheimer made enemies as easily as friends. Monk is at his best when teasing apart Oppenheimer’s confusing inner life, finding in his ‘enigmatic elusiveness’ and ‘his inability to make ordinary close contact’ with others the source of his acknowledged genius in leading the Manhattan Project.” —\u003ci\u003eSan Francisco Chronicle\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“An extraordinarily rich biography, superbly researched and written with impressive clarity. It is a considerable achievement of scholarship.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e—The Times \u003c\/i\u003e(London)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Does what nothing so far written on the enigmatic physicist has attempted: integrating into a seamless whole a profound inquiry into the formative influences on Oppenheimer’s character, a definitive account of his complex role in the development of the atomic bomb and a penetrating analysis of the philosophical implications of the new physics. It is not just a great biography but a powerful work of art.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e—New Statesman \u003c\/i\u003e(London)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Monk describes and explains Oppenheimer’s contributions to physics and places them in their historical context. . . . The permutations of the Oppenheimer enigma are investigated in this nonpareil biography.” \u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe Buffalo News\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“It is the epic story of the atomic bomb and Oppenheimer’s fall from grace in the McCarthyite era that stir the reader. . . . Science has received short shrift from [Oppenheimer’s] several biographers. It is this that Ray Monk’s life has set out to rectify.” \u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe Independent\u003c\/i\u003e (London)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “A triumph of historical investigation. . . . It is the most personal and sensitive biography of Oppenheimer so far published; the man himself rises from the pages, a figure worthy at times of reverence, but often of contempt.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e—The Telegraph \u003c\/i\u003e(London)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Monk retells this great 20th-century tragedy magnificently, in measured English prose, not \u003ci\u003eTime\u003c\/i\u003e journalese. . . . The tension between Oppenheimer’s two sides—his need to be at the centre of power versus his wish to retain his conscience—lie at the heart of [this] wonderful new biography.” \u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe Observer\u003c\/i\u003e (London)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “[The book paints] a detailed picture of two groups of people who played an important role in Oppenheimer’s life: the tightly knit society of wealthy German New York Jews to which his parents belonged, and the small army of security officers who monitored his social and political activities when he was engaged in secret work in Berkeley and Los Alamos. . . . Monk brings these two groups vividly to life.” \u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe New York Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“It’s not just brilliant, original, and the best biography of Oppenheimer to date, it’s epic. Also totally gripping and immensely satisfying. . . . I’ve read so much about Oppenheimer, but this is the first time I felt I understood why what happened to him happened.” \u003cbr\u003e—Sylvia Nasar, author of \u003ci\u003eA Beautiful Mind\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eGrand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “[Monk is an] inspired philosophical biographer. . . . This is an eagerly awaited and important book which will explore new boundaries in the writing of biography itself.” \u003cbr\u003e—Richard Holmes, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Age of Wonder\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Oppenheimer alone is a fascinating subject, but Monk provides copious illuminating detail from the historical surround. . . . [A] superb biography.” \u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eLondon Review of Books\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “This grand biography illuminates the genius of a fascinating scientist as driven by his own research as he was driven to lead and inspire others.” \u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “A highly detailed examination. . . . Monk does full justice to Oppenheimer’s irreplaceable contribution to the development of nuclear energy during and after World War II. . . . A top-notch biography.” \u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e (starred review)Ray Monk is the author of \u003ci\u003eLudwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius\u003c\/i\u003e, for which he was awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the Duff Cooper Prize, and a two-volume biography of Bertrand Russell. He is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton.\u003ci\u003eExcerpted from the Hardcover edition\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Amerika, du hast es besser ”:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOppenheimer’s German Jewish Background\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJ.  Robert Oppenheimer, his friend Isidor Rabi once remarked, was “a man  who was put together of many bright shining splinters,” who “never got  to be an integrated personality.” What prevented Oppenheimer from being  fully integrated, Rabi thought, was his denial of a centrally important  part of himself: his Jewishness. As the physicist Felix Bloch, echoing  Rabi, once put it, Oppenheimer “tried to act as if he were not a Jew and  succeeded well because he was a good actor.” And, because he was always  acting (“you carried on a charade with him. He lived a charade,” Rabi  once remarked), he lost sight of who he really was. Oppenheimer had an  impressive and wide-ranging collection of talents, abilities and  personal characteristics, but where the central, united core of his  personality ought to have been, Rabi thought, there was a gap and so  there was nothing to hold those “bright shining splinters” together. “I  understood his problem,” Rabi said, and, when asked what that problem  was, replied simply: “Identity.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRabi spoke as someone who, by  virtue of his background, intelligence and education, was well placed to  understand Oppenheimer’s “problem.” He and Oppenheimer had a great deal  in common: they were roughly the same age (Rabi was six years older),  they were both theoretical physicists, were both brought up in New York  City and were both descended from European Jewish families. Behind this  last similarity, however, lay a fundamental difference. Rabi was proud  of his Jewish inheritance and happy to define himself in terms of it.  Though he had no religious beliefs, and never prayed, he once said that  when he saw Orthodox Jews at prayer, the thought that came into his mind  was: “These are my people.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNo such thought could have entered  Oppenheimer’s mind, no matter who he was looking at. There was no group  to whom he could point and say, “These are my people,” and not just  because of his ambivalence about his Jewish background. It was also  because that background itself, regardless of Oppenheimer’s feelings  about it, could not have provided him with the sense of belonging and,  therefore, the sense of identity that Rabi thought was missing in him.  Rabi, despite his lack of religious beliefs, was Jewish in a fairly  straightforward and unambiguous way; the Jews simply were “his people.”  Theirs was the community to which he belonged. One cannot say the same  about Oppenheimer. The sense in which he was Jewish, the sense in which  he did--and did not--come from, and belong to, a Jewish community, is  far more complicated and, as Rabi has perceptively noted, crucial in  understanding the fragility of  his sense of identity.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor an  understanding of the elusive nature of Oppenheimer’s Jewishness, the  contrast between his family background and Rabi’s is instructive.  Despite their many and important similarities, and despite the fact that  they grew up within a few miles of each other, Rabi and Oppenheimer  were born into and brought up in families that were culturally worlds  apart. Rabi was a “Polish Jew.” Born in Galicia to a poor,  Yiddish-speaking family of Orthodox Jews, he came to New York as an  infant and was raised, first in the crowded slums of the Lower East Side  and then in a tiny apartment in Brooklyn. Oppenheimer was born not in  Europe, but in New York City, to a wealthy family that had abandoned its  Jewish faith and traditions a generation earlier. The bustling and  crowded “Jewish Ghetto” of the Lower East Side would have seemed utterly  alien to the young Oppenheimer, who was brought up in an enormous  luxury apartment in the genteel Upper West Side. The family had never  spoken Yiddish, and, though German was his father’s first language, it  was never spoken at home.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd yet, despite regarding himself as  neither German nor Jewish, Oppenheimer was seen, by Jews and non-Jews  alike, as a “German Jew.” In New York in the early twentieth century the  central division among the Jewish community was between, on the one  hand, the German Jews and, on the other, the Polish and Russian  Jews--the differences between the two groups accurately mirrored by the  differences between Oppenheimer and Rabi. The German Jews, sometimes  called “Uptown Jews,” were on the whole wealthier, more assimilated and  less religious than their Polish and Russian counterparts, to whom they  were notoriously condescending. At the time of Oppenheimer’s birth in  1904 there were more Polish and Russian Jews in New York than German  Jews, but the Germans assumed leadership of the Jewish community and  took it upon themselves to help “Americanize” the Russians and Poles,  who reacted with resentment at what they saw as a dismissal of their  religion and their customs.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat Rabi called Oppenheimer’s  problem--the problem of identity--was, in fact, a problem for the entire  American Jewish community, perhaps its central problem. Certainly it  was the issue at the heart of the tension between the two groups of Jews  in New York City. For the Russian and Polish Jews, their sense of  identity was bound up with their Jewishness: their Orthodox religious  beliefs, their Yiddish language and their Jewish culture and traditions.  That sense of identity, that culture, however, had been abandoned by  the German Jews before they even came to America.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe mass  migration of German Jews to America that occurred in the mid-nineteenth  century was intimately bound up with their earlier abandonment of the  traditional trappings of Jewish identity. Haskalah, the Jewish  Enlightenment of the late eighteenth century, was an essentially German  movement, its prophet being the great Prussian Jewish thinker Moses  Mendelssohn. Haskalah, which led in turn to that other essentially  German movement, Reform Judaism, encouraged Jews to, literally and  metaphorically, leave the ghettos in which they had been confined and  embrace the modernizing ideas of the wider Western European  Enlightenment. This meant using German rather than Hebrew as the  language of worship, abandoning traditions and customs that served to  isolate Jews from the rest of society, and reforming Jewish education so  that it prepared people for the world at large rather than schooling  them in a separate culture. The hope that inspired these changes was  that, in return for abandoning those aspects of their culture that  identified them as radically different from others, the Jews would  receive from the gentile world a lifting of the discriminatory laws that  affected almost every aspect of their lives, and a full acceptance as  members of society with the same legal, financial and political rights  as other citizens. Thus fully assimilated, Jews would no longer think of  themselves as a separate race or nation, but rather as adherents of a  religion. Their nationality would be German, and they would be not a bit  less German for worshipping in a synagogue rather than a church.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt  was the dashing of this hope that persuaded hundreds of thousands of  German Jews in the middle decades of the nineteenth century to turn  their backs on their home country and look to America--a country founded  upon the proposition that the equality of all men and the  inalienability of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of  happiness were self-evident truths--to find the freedom and equality  they had failed to achieve in Germany. Thus, in the eyes of German Jews,  America became not only a refuge from discrimination and prejudice, but  also the national embodiment of Enlightenment ideals, the ideals of  Haskalah. Many of them therefore ceased trying to become accepted as  Germans and sought instead to become accepted as Americans.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Amerika,  du hast es besser.” These famous words of Goethe are contained in the  poem “Den Vereinigten Staaten” (“To the United States”), written in  1827, when, as an old man, he reflected upon the advantages that  youthful America had over the “Old Continent” in having no tradition, no  “decaying castles,” and being therefore free from the continuous strife  that comes from long memories. The image of America that Goethe’s poem  conjures up is one of a tabula rasa, waiting, so to speak, to have its  history written upon it. This was an image perfectly suited to arouse  the interest and expectations of the German Jews, a group who longed to  start afresh, free from the tensions and prejudices of the past.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd  so, beginning in the 1820s, the rallying cry “On to America” echoed  throughout the Jewish community in Germany. A whole movement grew up  dedicated to the encouragement of migration to the United States,  publicizing the financial, social and political advantages of the New  World, and providing hope and support to those prepared to make what  must have been an alarming as well as an exciting fresh start. In books  by Europeans who had been to America, in letters to relatives from those  who had migrated, and in village meetings where people gathered to hear  firsthand accounts of American life from migrants who had returned to  visit families, the image of America as “the common man’s utopia” was  spread, inspiring more and more Jews to set sail for the United States.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA  typical example of such inspirational firsthand accounts is a letter  written in November 1846 by the journalist and academic Max Lilienthal,  which was published in the German Jewish weekly newspaper Allgemeine  Zeitung des Judenthums. Extolling “the beautiful ground of civil  equality” that he had discovered in America, Lilienthal announced: “The  old Europe with its restrictions lies behind me like a bad  dream . . . At last I breathe in liberty . . . Jew or Christian,  Christian or Jew--this old strife is forgotten, and only the man as such  is respected and loved.” Encouraging others to follow his example, he  urged: “Shake off the centuries-old dust of Jew-pressure . . . become a  human being like everybody else.” And, he promised, in America: “Jewish  hearts are open in welcome. Jewish organisations ready to help anyone.  Why should you go on carrying the burden of legal exclusion?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe  number of German Jews willing and eager to “shake off the centuries-old  dust of Jew-pressure” was so large that it completely transformed the  American Jewish community. In 1840, there were just 15,000 Jews in the  United States; by 1880, there were 280,000, most of whom were of German  origin. This influx of German Jews is known to Jewish historians as the  “Second Migration”--the “First Migration” being the arrival in the  seventeenth century of a small community of Sephardic Jews. These were  descendants of the Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal in the  fifteenth century, who, by the nineteenth century, were a  well-established part of American life.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThese self-styled “old  American Sephardic families” took pride in the fact that they had been  in America for as many generations as the descendants of the Pilgrim  Fathers, and tended to treat the new German arrivals with the kind of  lofty disdain with which the German Jews would later treat the Russians  and Poles. The first German Jews to arrive in America accepted the  leadership of the old Sephardic community and even adopted the Sephardic  form of worship. When the number of German Jewish migrants began to  increase dramatically, however, the balance of power shifted and the  German, Ashkenazi Jews replaced the Sephardim as the leaders of the  American Jewish community.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe mass influx into America of  Russian and Polish Jews, which took place from 1880 to 1920, formed the  “Third Migration,” and was on an entirely different scale from the  previous two, being measured not in tens of thousands, or in hundreds of  thousands, but in millions. Roughly two and a half million Jews from  Eastern Europe arrived in the United States during the Third Migration,  bringing with them a very different kind of Jewish culture from that of  either the Sephardim or the Germans.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe arrival of these Russian  and Polish Jews was such an embarrassment to the established German  Jewish community that their first reaction to it was to argue, through  editorials in their newspaper, American Hebrew, and direct lobbying from  their organization, the United Hebrew Charities of New York, for the  introduction of tougher immigration laws. When this came to nothing and  the number of Eastern European Jewish immigrants kept rising, the German  Jews set up the Education Alliance, which organized Americanization  programs in which the new immigrants were instructed in “the privileges  and duties of American citizenship.” What drove these measures was not  only the German Jews’ love of America, but also a dread of the  anti-Semitism which they feared the Eastern European Jews would arouse.  The Jewish historian Gerald Sorin points out: “These uptowners were very  taken with Israel Zangwill’s play ‘The Melting Pot.’ They saw in it a  reinforcement of their own proposed solution for the problems of  downtown: the sooner immigrants from eastern Europe gave up their  cultural distinctiveness and melted into the homogenized mass, the  sooner anti-Semitism would also melt.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt was a strategy that  German Jews had tried unsuccessfully in Germany, but which seemed to be  working in the United States. It required, however, constant vigilance  with respect to “cultural distinctiveness,” a vigilance that could  easily slip into the kind of self-denial of which Rabi accused  Oppenheimer. One form this vigilance took was an acute sensitivity among  German Jews about their names. Sometimes this led to the abandonment of  German-sounding surnames, a notable example being August Schonberg, the  son of an impoverished Jewish family from the Rhineland, who would  become famous as the millionaire New York banker August Belmont. More  often, though, it took the form of changing one’s first name and giving  to one’s children names that sounded reassuringly “American.” Joseph  Seligman, another millionaire New York banker, brought his brothers,  Wolfgang, Jacob and Isaias, over from Germany, but on arrival they  became William, James and Jesse. The names of Joseph Seligman’s children  look like a roll call of American heroes: George Washington Seligman,  Edwin Robert Anderson Seligman and Alfred Lincoln Seligman (evidently  “Abraham” was considered too Judaic).\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOf the American heroes  commemorated in these names, the least well known today is undoubtedly  Robert Anderson. He was a major in the U.S. army at the time of the  outbreak of the Civil War in April 1861 and was involved in the opening  hostilities, when Fort Sumter in South Carolina, which was then under  his command, came under fire from the Confederates. For holding his  ground and defending the fort for thirty-four hours Major Anderson was  promoted by Abraham Lincoln to Brigadier General and became a national  hero, not just for the duration of the war, but also for many decades  afterward. Because of him, the name “Robert” became immensely popular.  For anyone wanting to affirm the American identity of their offspring,  it was the natural choice. Indeed J. Robert Oppenheimer was to like it  so much that he ignored the “J” in his name and was known, by family and  friends, simply as “Robert” or “Bob.” When he was asked what the “J”  stood for, he would reply that it stood for nothing. In fact, as his  birth certificate shows, it stands for “Julius,” his father’s name. For  anyone striving to avoid “cultural distinctiveness,” the name “Robert  Oppenheimer,” or even “J. Robert Oppenheimer,” had obvious advantages  over “Julius Oppenheimer.”","brand":"Anchor","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304622117093,"sku":"NP9780385722049","price":24.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780385722049.jpg?v=1767735850","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/robert-oppenheimer-isbn-9780385722049","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}