Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb: Young Readers Edition of AMERICAN PROMETHEUS: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

by Kai Bird, Martin J. Sherwin, Eric S. Singer (Adapted by)

Overview

A young readers edition of the #1 New York Times bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning book American Prometheus was the inspiration for the blockbuster film, Oppenheimer.

This brand-new edition introduces the next generation to one of the twentieth century's most iconic and complex global figures.

J. Robert Oppenheimer was a brilliant physicist who led the American effort to build the atomic bomb during World War II, and who later found himself confronting the moral consequences of the revolutionary weapon he helped create.

Readers of all ages will witness the rise and fall of a scientific and historical icon in this masterful new edition. Exploring his childhood, his secret work on the bomb, his central role in the Cold War, and his tragic downfall, this quintessential biography is history at its finest. Filled with dozens of photographs and updated information, this riveting and deeply informative account is now available to a middle and high school audience.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593856451
Publisher:	Penguin Young Readers Group
Publication date:	05/13/2025
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.20(d)
Age Range:	10 - 18 Years

About the Author

KAI BIRD is an award-winning historian and journalist. Executive Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography, he is the acclaimed author of biographies of John J. McCloy, McGeorge and William Bundy, Robert Ames, and President Jimmy Carter. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography for American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (co-authored with Martin J. Sherwin), which was adapted into the Academy Award-winning film Oppenheimer. His work has been honored with the BIO Award for his significant contributions to the art and craft of biography. He has also written about the Vietnam War, Hiroshima, nuclear weapons, the Cold War, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the CIA. He lives in New York City and Washington, D.C., with his wife, Susan Goldmark.

MARTIN J. SHERWIN (1937–2021), distinguished historian and writer, was the author of A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and Its Legacies, which won the Stuart L. Bernath Prize, the American History Book Prize, and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. After twenty years of research, he joined with Kai Bird to complete the award-winning biography, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. His last book was Gambling with Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Sherwin served on the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley, Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania and Dartmouth College. As the Walter S. Dickson Professor of English and American History at Tufts University for nearly 25 years, he founded the Nuclear Age History and Humanities Center there. In the last decade of his life, he was a University Professor at George Mason University and worked with the Wilson Center's History & Public Policy Program in Washington, DC, to develop the "Nuclear Boot Camp,” a program to support young scholars of nuclear history.

ERIC S. SINGER is a high school and university educator, and historian of the Cold War in the United States. He served on the faculty of the University of Baltimore, where he taught about the Cold War’s impact on ordinary Americans’ lives, and other social, political, and structural forces that shaped American culture over four centuries. He previously adapted Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick's The Untold History of the United States. His work has been featured in Hamburg Institute for Social Research’s Angst im Kalten Kreig (Fear in the Cold War), Urban History, The Nation, The Baltimore Sun, San Francisco Chronicle, Teen Vogue, and The Baltimore Banner. He lives outside Washington, D.C., with his wife, daughter, and dog, Umji.

Read an Excerpt

PROLOGUE
August 6, 1945
8:15 a.m.
Hiroshima, Japan
Ten-­year-­old Toshio Nakamura woke from a short night’s sleep. He was home in Hiroshima, Japan, eating peanuts as he sat on his bedroll. Suddenly, without warning, an enormous FLASH bathed the space around him in a blinding white light. Before he knew it, he and his two younger sisters, Myeko and Yaeko, were in the air—a violent blast blew them clear across the room. Toshio landed on top of Myeko, whose legs were pinned under a piece of fallen timber. She was crying, “Mother, help me!”
With a mother’s reflex, Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura ran to her children, desperate to dig them out of the debris. Toshio was unharmed, but Myeko was buried up to her chest. Yaeko was still below—silent. Frantically, Mrs. Nakamura threw aside shards of broken tile and lifted the heavy pieces of timber pinning her two daughters. She quickly freed Myeko. Then she saw Yaeko’s arm. She tugged.
“Itai! It hurts!” Yaeko wailed.
Relieved that her children were unharmed, Mrs. Nakamura yelled back, “There’s no time now to say whether it hurts or not.” Then she jerked Yaeko up, freeing her from the remains of their collapsed house.
The Nakamuras went out to the street. They gasped in disbelief, for in front of them lay a scene of utter destruction. All the houses on their block had been reduced to piles of rubble, just like theirs.
As they would later find out, the four-­engined American B-­29 SuperfortressEnola Gay had just dropped on their city the first atomic bomb ever used in war. The bomb exploded two thousand feet over Hiroshima’s main shopping district, and in less than a second, the temperature at"ground zero"reached seven thousand degrees Fahrenheit. People as far away as one half mile instantly turned to water vapor. Statues melted, roof tiles fused together, and buildings caught fire or exploded with unimaginable ferocity. At least eighty thousand people died immediately. The Nakamuras’ house was about three-quarters of a mile from the center of the explosion, sparing them that fate.
“The neighbors were walking around burned and bleeding,” Toshio later recalled. “We went to the park. A whirlwind came. At night a gas tank burned, and I saw the reflection in the river. We stayed in the park [that] night. Next day I went to Taiko Bridgeand met my girlfriends Kikuki and Murakami. They were looking for their mothers. But Kikuki’s mother was wounded, and Murakami’s mother, alas, was dead.”2
Three Days Later
Nagasaki, Japan
Shortly after 11:00 in the morning, twelve-­year-­old Hiroyasu Tagawa heard the distant whir of a plane flying high over his aunt’s house, where he was staying with his sister. Four months earlier, an evacuation forced the family to leave their home in downtown Nagasaki. So that the kids could remain close to school, they agreed to temporarily split up. Hiroyasu and his sister moved in with their aunt, who lived a short distance from town, while their parents moved to Urakami, a neighborhood farther up the Urakami River on the city’s northern fringe.
Hiroyasu ran out to the garden. He looked up to the sky. Sure enough, a plane sailed high over the mountaintop, the sun glinting off the metal of its fuselage.
Suddenly, everything turned orange. Hiroyasu quickly covered his eyes and ears and dropped to the ground. This was the position he practiced daily at school for times like this. “Soon dust and debris and pieces of glass were flying everywhere,” he recalled. “After that, silence.”

Editorial Reviews

★ "[A] superb adaptation....An undivided pleasure to read, excellent for classroom use as well as independent reading."—Booklist (starred review)

"A meticulous account of the rise and fall of a brilliant scientist."—Kirkus Reviews

"A strong choice for nonfiction shelves and as a curricular tie-in due to the significance of the subject’s contribution to science and world history." —School Library Journal

"[A] cohesive, entirely accessible portrait of a complex, often reticent man whose life’s work left a mark both on the physical and scientific worlds." —BCCB

From the Publisher

2025-02-15
A meticulous account of the rise and fall of a brilliant scientist.

Though only around half the page length of the prize-winningAmerican Prometheus (2005), the inspiration for the 2023 film, this bulky adaptation for young people still bulges with finely chopped details. The authors cover Oppenheimer’s life, from houses and horses to the kangaroo court government hearing that led to his instant downfall from “America’s darling physicist” to “the most prominent victim of the McCarthy era.” Disappointingly, readers willing to stay the course won’t find the original’s probing study of the scientific breakthroughs and engineering miracles that Oppenheimer presided over as director of the Manhattan Project, which engendered the first nuclear weapons. What still emerges very clearly is how the conflict between his deep moral sensibility and his equally profound love for scientific truth and the country that betrayed him made him a tragic hero in the classic vein. The major figures are white, but the authors properly acknowledge the government’s cavalier displacement of Latine farmers around Los Alamos and the Micronesian residents of the Bikini Atoll, along with the relentless toll radioactive dust has taken on these communities. The authors also repeatedly note that Japanese leaders were maneuvering toward surrender even as the U.S. government killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

A searching, scorching study of a complex character, trimmed but still weighed down by too much minor detail. (note from Sherwin, adapter’s note, list of historical figures, endnotes, photo credits, index)(Nonfiction. 11-16)

Kirkus Reviews