American Prometheus

***THE INSPIRATION FOR CHRISTOPHER NOLAN'S FORTHCOMING NEW FILM OPPENHEIMER***WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR NONFICTION 'Reads like a thriller, gripping and terrifying' Sunday TimesPhysicist and polymath, as familiar with Hindu scriptures as he was with quantum mechanics, J. Robert Oppenheimer - director of the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb - was the most famous scientist of his generation. In their meticulous and riveting biography, Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin reveal a brilliant, ambitious, complex and flawed man, profoundly involved with some of the momentous events of the twentieth century.

A riveting account of one of history's most essential and paradoxical figures., Reads like a thriller, gripping and terrifying by turns... No more absorbing biography will, I predict, come out this year, nor, given the dangers we face, a more important one., Fascinating... Enthralling... All previous works on the topic are, in the nicest possible sense, blown out of the sky by a book which is, in both the proper and metaphorical meanings, monumental., No previous biography has... matched the power, range and lucidity of Martin Sherwin and Kai Bird's Life... Its combination of meticulous scholarship and felicitous prose grasps the drama of Oppenheimer's life in all its riveting complexity. , A giant among biographies, a life story that at times reads like a thriller but which is also deeply authoritative and persuasively informative.... Magisterial.

Kai Bird is a contributing editor at The Nation and the author of several biographies, including The Chairman, The Color of Truth, The Good Spy and The Outlier. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Writing Fellowship.Martin J. Sherwin was a Professor of History at George Mason University. His other books include A World Destroyed, winner of the Stuart L. Bernath and the American History Book prizes, and Gambling with Armageddon.