American Prometheus, by Kai Bird, Martin J. Sherwin | Free Audiobook

The man who seized fire from the sun

J. Robert Oppenheimer built the atomic bomb and then spent the rest of his life wrestling with what he had unleashed. This Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, twenty-five years in the making, follows the brilliant theoretical physicist from his privileged New York upbringing through his transformative years at Cambridge, Göttingen, and Berkeley, where he created the leading American school of quantum physics.

Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin draw on thousands of documents, massive FBI files, and nearly a hundred interviews to reconstruct Oppenheimer's journey to Los Alamos, where he turned a remote mesa into the world's most powerful weapons laboratory. But the book's most gripping chapters chronicle what came after Hiroshima, when Oppenheimer advocated for international control of atomic materials and opposed the hydrogen bomb, decisions that made him a target during the Red Scare.

The result was a security hearing orchestrated by Lewis Strauss, Edward Teller, and J. Edgar Hoover that destroyed Oppenheimer's reputation and stripped him of his clearance. Jeff Cummings narrates with measured gravity, giving voice to a man caught between scientific ambition and moral reckoning. This is the definitive account of a life inseparable from the atomic age itself, and the inspiration for Christopher Nolan's film Oppenheimer.