Biography

Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Ray Monk

Reviewed by •
June 2013, no. 352
Father of the Bomb

Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer

by Ray Monk

Jonathan Cape, $65 hb, 832 pp, 9780224062626

Biography

Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Ray Monk

Reviewed by •
June 2013, no. 352

The title of Ray Monk’s biography of Robert Oppenheimer plays on several ‘centres’: the entrancing interior of the atom wherein physicists found the secrets of nuclear energy; the institutional centres of American intellectual life that served as Oppenheimer’s professional milieu; the seductive hubs of political power to which he felt a fatal attraction; his own inner life, full of strange shadows and paradoxes.

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Harry Oldmeadow

Harry Oldmeadow was formerly coordinator of Philosophy and Religious Studies at La Trobe University, Bendigo. His most recent book is Touchstones of the Spirit: Religion, Tradition and Modernity (2012).
Father of the Bomb

Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer

by Ray Monk

Jonathan Cape, $65 hb, 832 pp, 9780224062626

Leave a comment
Harry Oldmeadow

Harry Oldmeadow was formerly coordinator of Philosophy and Religious Studies at La Trobe University, Bendigo. His most recent book is Touchstones of the Spirit: Religion, Tradition and Modernity (2012).

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