Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, starring Cillian Murphy as the titular theoretical physicist, opened last week to rave reviews and explosive box office success. Nolan's biopic is based on American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, published by Knopf in 2005. The book took decades to complete. Sherwin began in 1979, several years after authoring A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and Its Legacies. He interviewed more than 100 people involved with Oppenheimer (who died in 1967) and compiled tens of thousands of pages of research, which sat unused until 1999. Bird, previously the author of several political biographies, helped turn Sherwin's research into what the Boston Globe called "an Everest among the mountains of books on the bomb project and Oppenheimer."
American Prometheus won the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. Sherwin's final book before his death in 2021 was Gambling with Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Bird's most recent work is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter, published in 2021. American Prometheus is available in paperback from Vintage ($25). --Tobias Mutter
