American Prometheus

Bit of a tough one to review. Obviously this book was meticulously researched, and overall well-written. I learned a lot from it, and found the subject matter to be fascinating. I listened to it on audiobook, narrated by Jeff Cummings, and I have to say that the audiobook production was among the worst I've listened to. I won't be lowering my score for that, but it genuinely felt that they had the author go back and re-narrate parts of the book weeks later - sometimes within the same paragraph the voice would be jarringly different, including the pronunciations of people's names! Very bizarre.

Obviously with how Oppenheimer's downfall played out there would be a lot of talk in this book about his associations with Communists, and I can't fault that the book would take a look at things like that. But boy did the book repeatedly do audits of Oppenheimer's friends and acquaintances, and who was or wasn't a communist at that very moment. To me it felt like this interrupted the flow of the narrative quite a bit. Generally it all got brought back together and would be referred to later on in the book, but as the least interested element of his story to me it felt like too much.

I read this book after watching Oppenheimer, and have since rewatched the movie. It's quite clear that the movie is possibly more of an adaptation of this book than an independent biopic, and virtually all the people mentioned in this book show up in the movie, lots of them with direct quotes. It has made the movie more enjoyable to watch, but at this point feels almost like essential reading to properly enjoy the movie adaptation of this book.