ResoluteReader: August 2025

Friday, August 15, 2025

Iain M. Banks - Inversions

Inversions is one of Iain M. Banks' novels that I read multiple times after it came out, but haven't read in... well as long as this blog has been going. I found it again recently and re-reading it I was struck by how great a book it is.

The book is set on an unnamed planet, but one where a former powerful Empire has fragmented into rival states following what sounds like a major disaster with multiple asteroid impacts. The remaining rival kingdoms are analogous to Earth's European feudal states - though Banks is very careful not to make them identical. Knights may wear armour and ride to battle - but whether they are on horses is never clear. Banks avoids using words that tie things too closely to Earth.

There are two parallel stroies. Alternate chapters are titled The Doctor and The Bodyguard. Both characters are in kingdoms separated by a great distance. The Doctors' chapters are told by her assistant Oelph, though they are really his lengthy reports to an unnamed Master who is spying on the Doctor. The Doctor has arrived from a third, distant land, and risen quickly to become the personal physician to the King. This causes jealously, suspicion and doubt, particularly when the King begins enacting reforms that benefit the cities and the lower, producing, classes.

The Bodyguard is Oelph's publishing of a separate story that he finds long after the events he is involved in. Consisting of the account of the personal guard to another king, there are natural parallels with The Doctor chapters. But this consists of The Bodyguard's attempts to protect the King and his family while facing down external threats. In doing so he befriends one of the King's harem women and the King's son.

The Bodyguard tells his friends stories, and these can be read, particularly by those who've read other works by Banks, as examples of the way that The Culture view other civilisations that have not yet reached their level of technological and cultural sophistication. A further clue that this is set in the Culture universe and that the Bodyguard and Doctor are possibly not from the planet at all, lies in they way their ideas do not quite fit those of their chosen kingdoms. But are they there as agents of the Culture? Or are they running away from something? Or perhaps each other.

Ultimately it becomes clear that the Doctor at least is from another place - she has access to knowledge and equipment that are far beyond the planet's technological development. However if the novel is reduced to this guessing game it does it a disservice. The best thing about the novel is the interaction between the characters from different societies. It reminded me of a classic Soviet SF novel Hard to be a God by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky which postulates a future socialist society's agents observing and living within a feudal society trying (or not) to influence its development (while also critiquing the Soviet Union itself).

The book has little of Banks' trademark hard SF. Its focus is on relationships - and there are several that are beautifully described - in particular that between the Doctor and Oelph and the Bodyguard and Perrund, the King's concubine. But there are others - the Doctor falls for the King and in one moment of exuberance announces her love. It devastates Oelph, but more importantly it shifts the story dramatically as the Doctor realises she cannot be both of the world and from elsewhere.

Despite barely being The Culture, this is one of the great Culture novels - demonstrating Banks' amazing abilities as a writer, and his ability to hand multiple different ideas and characters. Well worth a read, or re-read.

Iain Banks - Canal Dreams

Somewhere in my head I had an idea that Iain Banks' novel Canal Dreams was written for a bet. Someone suggested an utterly implausible plot, and Banks proved he could get it published. For the life of me I cannot find evidence of this on the internet, though I do understand that Banks was never particularly happy with the work.

Perhaps Banks was too much of a perfectionist, because while the plot is implausible, it is certainly an exciting read. It centres on Hisako Onoda, a Japanese virtuoso cellist whose fear of flying means that she embarks on a world tour by boat. Travelling through the Panama Canal as the region slides into war, her and several other cargo boats and their passengers and crew are trapped on the Canal near Panama. As the wait drags on, those trapped entertain themselves with dinner parties, arguments and romantic liasions. Eventually, however, the ships become the target of terrorists who want to use them as a base to attack US interests.

The first part of the book sets up the concept through a series of flashbacks as Hisako remembers her life, and how she came to play the cello. It follows her through music school and a centre point is her first failure to fly. Meant to accompany her orchestra on a plane to tour the US, she's unable to go, and the turning point becomes an emblematic moment for her - both in her transition to adulthood and her image of herself as a loner.

Trapped on the ship, she falls in love with a flamboant and cocky French officer, who teachers her scuba diving, in exchange for intimate lessons on the cello. In the midst of war and uncertainty this becomes Hisako's first real taste of stablity and love.

But then the terrroists hit, and the book becomes a classic adventure story as Hisako fights for her survival and tries to prevent a wider atrocity. Here I am being vague, because there is a major twist that deserves to be unknown in advance of reading. But it is the destruction of her cello that symbolises most Hisako's transition from to vengeful violence.

The last part of the book is essentially an action film on paper. It is an entertaining read, but perhaps is too much of a stylistic break from the first half to make for that satisfactory a novel. But whether written as a bet, or not, there's an entertaining and clever adventure here that will while away a couple of hours.

Related Reviews

Banks - Raw Spirit
Banks - Whit
Banks - Stonemouth
Banks - Dead Air
Banks - The Steep Approach to Garbadale

Saturday, August 09, 2025

Susan Crawford - Charleston: Race, water & the coming storm

One of the immediate, and most expected, impacts of climate change is a rising sea level. Nasa says that "since the satellite record of ocean height began in 1993, the rate of annual sea level rise has more than doubled. In total, global sea level has gone up by 4 inches (10 centimeters) since 1993." But this is nothing to what is coming unless there is a rapid, and drastic, cut in carbon emissions. According to Susan Crawford, "some scientists say we should be planning on three feet of rise by 2050, six feet by 2070 and ten feet by 2100". For the majority of the world that uses metric units this is 0.91m, 1.82m and 3.05m. Billions of people who live in low lying and coastal areas will find themselves, their communities and their economies under threat from this future.

How will this threat impact? Susan Crawford's book is a study of one example - the lowlying, heavily populated southern US city of Charleston in South Carolina. Charleston is a fascinating place. It's a city that has been at the epicentre of US history, mostly because its geographical position meant the slave trade was centred there: about 40 percent of enslaved humans brought to the US from Africa came through Charleston's port. After the international trade in slavery was abolished, it became the centre of interal trade in enslaved people. The legacy of slavery, the centrality of the city to the Confederacy during the Civil War, and the legacy of racism and colonialism have meant that Charleston is a stunningly unequal city.

Climate change, and particularly flooding, will explode through and along the lines created by capitalism in this city - ones of race and class. As Crawford explains, Charleston's strategy for dealing with flooding exposes this directly:

The reason some breachfront homeowners, but not all, get that sand dumped on their beaches, and the reason that some portions of cities, but not all, get federal funds for building walls, is that the one rule of thumb for all these expenditurers is that they be made subject to a cost-benefit analysis. But that means the only thing that is valued is the price of the property being protected. Lower-income people, or renters, do not get protected or rescued.

"Surely," asks Crawford rhetorically, " we are interested in everyone thriving, not just those who have the highest land values." The answer is of course that no, US society does not care for all equally, nor does it have a plan for the majority of people who do not have valuable enough assets to warrant projection. In the case of Charleston almost all (but not everyone) of these people are black.

One way that we know the future will be like this is because the past and the present are already like this. The accident of history that placed the initially European settlers at this location, has also meant that the city that developed and grew up, was built on marshy, lowlying, wetlands. As the city expanded much of this was done on the waste and rubbish of the existing town. The poorest areas, again with almost an entirely black population, are built on the worst and most dangerous terrain. Unbelievably this means that some of the material supporting the roads, housing, hosptials and infrastructure is human waste, offal and rubbish. When the tides and storms come, the inevitable floods bring cholera and e-coli into the streets. Crawford uses Noaa data to explain how bad it will get:

Current (2020) numbers of flood days will double or triple by 2030 - double the eight-nine floods in 2019, the sixty-eight floods in 2020, the forty-six floods in 2021, each one of which made some roads in Charleston impassable and undermined strtures. By 2050 [Noaa] says, the number of days of more serious flooding could be five to fifteen times as great as it was in 2020.

Through a combination of reportage, statistics and interviews with citizens, Crawford shows how the black community is hit worst and first by these regular floods. The second thing she demonstrates is that the authorities have done nothing to aid the people at risk, instead channelling funds and investment into reinventing Charleston as a tourist hotspot for wealthy (white) tourists who come to experience Southern "charm". This mostly seems to involve a disney style experience of seeing homes built on the profits of slavery and eating expensive seafood on areas completely isolated from the real Charleston. Black, and poor, Charlestonians are excluded from the rich areas, as racism and poverty keeps them out of the bars, clubs, restaurants and other destinations. Over the years more and more areas have been converted by buying up land from black people (or forciably relocating them) in order to further expand this tourist paradise. Little of the new builds are flood proof, protected or insurable long term. "More than 100,000 structures in Charleston are sited in FEMA's notoriously inaccurate floodplains" says Crawford. FEMA is the Federal Emergency Management Agency whose funding and activities are already seriously under attack from Trump.

This is, of course, the great tragedy. Charleston is doomed. The first people to go will be those forced out of the unprotected areas. But unless there is radical action, great parts of Charleston will simply become unsalvabable. That's why Crawford discusses the reality of "retreat" in the face of sea level rise - something that's already being discussed in low lying areas like the Netherlands, but rarely is talked about in the US.

One of the things that I really enjoyed about Crawford's book is her focus on individuals from the affected communities - people who have lived, worked and frequently campaigned for change in Charleston's black areas. They are people whose families and communities are most at risk, and ultimately they are the people who are the only force that will bring change - both in terms of a socially just solution for everyone in the city and in terms of winning a wider, more equal United States. Stacked against them however are some greedy, corrupt and powerful forces. Time and again Crawford shows how politicians and business leaders, their eyes firmly focused on wealth and tax income, take decisions that mean ignoring the threat from sea-level rise. Its hard to even speak about climate change in the US political arena today. In Charleston's its near impossible to discuss the links between race, poverty and flooding. Local politicians seem to think that a magical solution is there in the future. Actually they really think that what will happen is a major disaster that will lead to significant funding from the Federal government.

The problem is that this seems less and less likely, and Charleston has its specifics, but it is not unique. Millions of Americans live in areas threatened by floods, and in this unequal, racist and violent society many of them (most?) will be left to fund for themselves. This is why I think Crawford's book would have benefited from a closer study of other countries impacted by floods - who returned home? Who got compensation? What sort of activism was needed to win compensation? In addition I think the book could have done with a long look at the aftermath of Katrina in New Orleans. There are plenty of lessons to be learnt for Charleston's future there in terms of race and class.

I explicitly mention class in ths context because the fractures in Charleston's society don't just run through racial lines, but also class lines. It is the poorest who will be affected first by climate change - wherever they are. These same inequalities also exist through the US, even if there are differing ethnic makeups. But class also helps us understand why there's no money for certain communities. Its not just racism (though that's very important) but also a disdain for those at the bottom - the very people who have a vested interest in building a different sort of America, and have the power to change it. And, let's be honest, no one else is coming to save them. Crawford writes:

Few are talking about how America is going to get through the rapid rise in sea level that is coming. Like most other countries, we have no national plan.

Susan Crawford's detailed study of the specifics of Charleston are important for understanding what will happen to the majority of citizens in that city, and other areas globally. For many readers, particularly those outside the US, the reality of racism in the southern states even today will be extremely shocking. At certain points I was dumbfounded by the realities of what the author described. I was also inspired that despite the difficulties and the violence of the police, people protested, campaigned, formed organisations, marched and stood up. That must be the hope for the future. Otherwise, as Susan Crawford says, things are bleak:

Charleston's story reveals a general blind spot that will become more visible as at least thirteen million people are expected to have to retreat from swamped [North] American coastlines. Americans will learn, if they did not know already, that some lives count and some do not.

It's a book for everyone thinking about the climate future in an unequal and unjust society that puts profits before people.

Wednesday, August 06, 2025

James Ellroy - Perfida

James Ellroy is perhaps best known for his two works Black Dahlia and LA Confidential. I recently read, and enjoyed, his American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand, set among conspirators, CIA agents, murders and racists around the time of the Kennedy assassination. When I reviewed American Tabloid I described it as being set in "the dark underbelly of the American dream".

Perfida is a very different book to the sprawling conspiracies of American Tabloid and its sequels. However it is also a very dark encounter with US history. Set in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbour, the book looks at a horrible episode in US history - the internment of thousands of Japanese Americans for alleged threats to national security. This infamous event was the culmination of racism, imperialism and an opportunity for people to steal the assets and land off those arrested and interned.

Ellroy explores this episode through the investigation by Los Angeles Police of the murder of a Japanese family. Two rival detectives, both of whom feature in other Ellroy novels set later, are here as is Hideo Ashida, an intriguing character - a Japanese forensic specialist cop. As they police investigate they unravel a conspiracy that brings together Fifth Columnists, asset strippers and many other lowly types, that threatens to spill over the bring down corrupt politicians, policeman and other nasty types.

Its a fat book. Ellroy's clipped style is taken to many an extreme here. "He snagged his car and laid tracks. He took the 1st Street bridge to Broadway. He took Broadway to the parkway. He popped two bennies and hit Avenue 45". It is not hard to believe that 790 pages could have been 350. Sadly Ellroy's probably too big an author to have that level of editing these days.

But lack of brevity is not the problem. Nor, indeed, is the violence. For me the convoluted plot took too long to bring to a conclusion and I had mostly lost interest by the time it was wrapped up. But if that was one issue the other was the characters who are too one-dimensional. There's Kay Lake a young woman with radical ideas desperate for adventure whose endless stream of lovers just happens to include almost every other major character. Her radicalism is quickly brought off by a policeman lover who happens to want her to destroy a group of leftists. The leftists in this book, including the awfully cliched radical filmmaker Claire De Haven (who has apparently read Marx and various religious tracts and concluded Marx got it wrong on religion and there is a god) are bad parodies but, I suspect, they reflect what Ellroy thinks about leftists of all stripes.

If the left in Perfida are corrupt, the right are appalling. But it is the right, the fascists and the racists, who get all the airtime to spot off their views and engage in their nefarious plots. There's plenty of random deaths, beatings and racist attacks here. But no one (even the leftists) seems to care. As I thought when I read LA Confidential, one of the problems is that there are no good, or kind, or even normal people in Ellroy's world. This is the underbelly of the US, but there's no nice side. No solidarity, friendship or kindness.

After finishing Perfida I realised that I had the option to read the rest of the trilogy. But I also realised I didn't care enough - about the characters, about what James Ellroy was trying to say, or about his distorted view of the world.

Tuesday, August 05, 2025

David Grann - The Wager: A tale of shipwreck, mutiny and murder

In May 1741 The Wager, a 28 gun Royal Navy ship on a voyage to harass Spanish treasure ships off the western coast of South America, ran aground on a then, nearly unknown, island. This barren mountainous place was home to some 150 castaways for months. David Grann's account of the voyage, the deprivations of the crew, the bullying of their officers and the appalling conditions on the island is based on a closed reading of all the contemporary accounts. On the island, the survivors gradually split into two groups - one, around Captain Cheap and the other the mutinous majority crew.

Despite the shipwreck, sickness, intense hunger and a severe shortage of any supplies Cheap harboured fantastical dreams of continuing the mission and bringing home glory to "King and country". The rest of the crew recognised that this was not just a fantasy, it would get them all killed, and so they wanted to go home. They did so by seizing control of a boat, supplies and heading back into the Straits of Magellan and home via Spanish controlled ports on the east coast. Some of them took longer. Many died. It was a brave and remarkable journey.

Cheap too eventually made it back, though with far fewer survivors, including the grandfather of the poet Lord Byron. For both groups of sailors the voyages to escape their shipwreck were as bad, if not worse, as the initial voyage itself.

Grann's account underlines the horror of life at sea in the 18th century. This was a violent "wooden world", one where officers had power over life and death, and where hunger, sickness and the horrors of life in a tiny wooden ship in high seas were ever present. In places the Grann's descriptions are almost unbelievable - how anyone could imagine a trip around Cape Horn could leave a small flotilla in a condition to wage war is mind boggling. Nonetheless the Admiralty seemed to think it was possible. But if your crew is sick of typhus, underpaid and terrified then you gets what you pay for (the cook was in their 80s!)

But what really makes Grann's book is his insights into the wider seafaring world. The horror of the castaway life on what became known as Wager Island, is linked to the wider horror of the transatlantic slave trade, colonisation and imperialist ambition. This raid took place during the jingoistic "War of Jenkin's ear". A conflict that should never have happened. It was a war all about British sea power, and those who died on, and off, the Wager were sacrificed to this ambition. Grann notes wider implications - the racist attitudes to indigenous people that drove their saviours away, and the horror that a black British seaman was kidnapped into slavery while on his way home. He even finishes with a second mutiny of enslaved people who were on the ship to Europe carrying some of Wager's survivors.

All in all this is a great read which has surprising depths and is strikingly anti-imperialist. I thought David Grann's earlier book Killers of the Flower Moon about the treatment of Native Americans was fantastic. This is not quite on the same par as that, but is a very good read.

Sunday, August 03, 2025

Kai Bird & Martin J Sherwin - American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

Like many others I bought American Prometheus after watching the 2023 film Oppenheimer. By any judgement, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the subject of the biography and film was a remarkable figure. A brilliant scientist who in his early career made a series of important breakthroughs in the febrile atmosphere of early 20th century physics, he was a public intellectual with connections and sympathies with many radical movements of pre-war United States. A multifaceted figure who found himself a central figure in one of the most controversial projects of World War Two - the development of the atom bomb.

Few of Oppenheimer's enemies would have disagreed with many of these judgements. They acknowledged his genius, his political connections and his central role in the creation of viable weapons of mass destruction. But for these enemies Oppenheimer was a threat to the security of the United States because he was prepared to openly discuss the moral consequences of the atom bomb's invention and its possible future. Fearing that he would use his position to undermine the US's post-war lead in nuclear technology, challenge its military doctrines, and possibly even strengthen its enemies, they decried him as a Communist - spread lies, undermined (and possibly killed) his friends, and dredged up past mistakes to blacken his name. In the growing anti-Communist witch-hunting atmosphere of the late 1940s and 1950s, Oppenheimer was one of thousands whose lives were destroyed. The difference was that Oppenheimer was famous and wealthy. Many others, from trade unionists and civil rights activists to leftists and even a handful of actual communists had their lives ruined.

American Prometheus is the story of how Oppenheimer found himself trapped in the logic of this witch-hunt. It begins with his childhood in a nurturing, wealthy, family who offered him opportunities to develop his knowledge and genius. He was also introduced to the finer things in a wealthy family's life - travel, cars, books and fine foods. Family Oppenheimer was the perfect space for Robert to develop - even if his own personal development was stunted at times. Travelling to Europe in the 1920s, Oppenheimer finished his Phd at an incredible scientific moment, studying and contributing to the insights of the emerging fields of Quantum Mechanics and nuclear sciences.

Back in the United States he found himself at an intoxicating moment. As a scientist, physics was expanding and breaking barriers on multiple fronts. There were countless opportunities for a physicist of Oppenheimer's brilliance to make a name for themselves. But for a liberal thinker, who was well read and engaging with wider political debates, there were many other opportunities. Oppenheimer found himself in the midst of growing political radicalism, the struggle for Civil Rights, and most particularly, the early 1930s, a wave of strikes in San Francisco.

It is here that the authors of American Prometheus really get to grips with Oppenheimer as an individual. Biographers (and indeed his enemies) have of course noted his left ideas, after all Oppenheimer himself did not exactly hide these. But he was teaching at Berkeley at a singular moment - a wave of strikes hit the port of San Francisco. Oppenheimer, some of his friends, and several of his students were supportive and engaged with the struggles:

Berkeley itself was split between critics and supporters of the strike. When the longshoremen initially walked out on May 9, 1934, a conservative member of the physics faculty, Leonard Loeb, recruited "Cal" football players to act as strikebreakers. Significantly, Oppenheimer later invited some of his students... to come along with him to a longshoremen's rally in a large San Francisco auditorium. " We were sitting up high in a balcony," recalled [Bob] Serber, "and by the end we were caught up in the enthusiasm of the strikers, shouting with them, 'Strike! Strike! Strike!' " Afterwards, Oppie went to the apartment of a friend, Estelle Caen, where he was introduced to Harry Bridges, the charismatic longshoreman union leader.

What is interesting here is that Oppenheimer wasn't just a casual onlooker, though he was not a political activist. He was engaged with struggles, and supportive of them. And indeed, in the case of unionisation, he encouraged it on several occasions through his working life. The point is that Oppenheimer had been immersed in radical politics that went beyond mere abstract ideas - though he certainly also engaged in those. He took these seriously, even if he did not always agree. One acquaintance thought he had read more Marx and Lenin than mnay active Communist Party members. While he certainly was radical, and was very close to some Communist Party activists - both his lover Jean Tatlock and his wife Katherine "Kitty" Puening, were CP members and activists - he was not a member (though even CP members often thought he was). The point of this is not that Oppenheimer was close to the CP. Its more that he had a set of ideas - political and scientific - shaped by a period of struggle in US history which influenced his thinking, while not being powerful enough to enable him to understand the threat to him posed by those who hated any ideas to the left of Harry Truman.

When World War Two came, the US scrambled to reassert itself. Money was poured into projects that could strengthen its military position. One of these was the Manhattan Project - the development of the atomic bomb. Oppenheimer was an obvious choice, though his politics made him already suspect. But crucially two factors, often ignored by his detractors decades later, were central. First was that the great threat from Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan meant that people were included into military arenas that they would not normally have been allowed into. People with suspect ideas, were not considered as much of a threat as they would under McCarthyism because the danger was very real. Even liberals like Oppenheimer, who hated the idea of unrestricted military murder, felt that the atom bomb was needed because Nazi Germany would otherwise get it. Note that at this point Nazi Germany was considered the real danger by the likes of Oppenheimer. The second issue was that the Soviet Union was a friend and ally.

Oppenheimer played a central role in making the bomb real - the book details his work, his influence and his importance and we need not be distracted by that here. But Oppenheimer also played an important role in making the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima happen. He drew up the instructions for the proper and best use of the first weapon. He did, as he later agonised, have "blood on his hands". Nonetheless the reality of the atrocities against Japan slowly changed his mind:

Once again [Oppenheimer] had failed to persuade the president and members of his Administration to turn their back on... "the whole rotten business." The Administration now supported a program to build a bomb 1,000 times as lethal as the Hiroshima weapon. Still, Oppenheimer would not "upset the applecart." He would remain an insider - albeit one who was increasingly outspoken and increasingly suspect.

Bird and Sherwin map the trajectory of Oppenheimer's transition from concerned scientist to outspoken critique of the nuclear strategy of the US and its allies. Though I should add here that I think they neglect the work of other scientists who tried hard to build a peace and anti-nuclear movement. This is well documented in Robert Jungk's excellent book Brighter Than One Thousand Suns. Jungk also highlights the significant role of other scientists in the development of nuclear physics, and more detail on events at Los Alamos. Bird and Sherwin's hyper-focus on Oppenheimer means that this material is often neglected undermining the larger story.

However what matters is not Oppenheimer's trajectory but the limitations of his politics. By the 1950s and 1960s, Oppenheimer retained his liberal criticisms of society. But he was very much a US patriot. The crude equation of Soviet Russia with existing Communism meant that Oppenheimer and many others, simply dismissed socialism completely and saw the US as the only option - albeit an option that had to be reformed.

Intriguingly it is no less a figure than Albert Einstein who understood Oppenheimer's greatest weakness. As the witch-hunting grew louder and those who wanted to dethrone Oppenheimer as a Communist who was at the heart of the US nuclear machine and consequently needed to be destroyed, circled, Einstein commented "the trouble with Oppenheimer is that he loves a woman who doesn't love him - the United States government." Despite the brilliance of his mind, Oppenheimer could comprehend that the US was not a democratic system based on rational debate. It was a imperialist power prepared to murder its enemies, destroy civilians and smash opposition that threatened it - however mild it might be.

Even after he was defeated and lost his security clearance, Oppenheimer remained, according to the science sociologist Charles Thorpe. "in spirit a supporter of the fundamental direction of its [the US's] politics". Bird and Sherwin point out that despite what the US state had done to him, "Robert was determined to prove that he was a reliable patriot". Indeed, his failure to challenge the dominant politics directly led to his downfall. As one person commented, "The trouble was [Oppenheimer] accepted his accusers' terms from the beginning... He should have told them at the outset that he was the builder of the atom bomb - that he was a scientist, not an informer".

Whether that would have been enough to save Oppenheimer from his enemies is a moot point. Socialists ought to, in my opinion, acknowledge the horrors unleashed by the US's nuclear strategy, and the problems inherent in the nuclear bomb. This is not to downplay or ignore the grave injustice of the witch-hunt against Oppenheimer and the others caught up in the US's anti-communist attacks. That said, Oppenheimer did at least get some vindication - subsequent US Presidents recognised the errors and injustices, as did many thousands of scientists and others.

The same was not true for countless radicals, trade unionists, and socialists who lost their livelihoods and sometimes their lives, as a result. Nonetheless the attacks on Oppenheimer, despite the lack of any real basis, the failure of any sense of natural justice, the collusion, smears and lies that brought him down had lasting impacts. Oppenheimer's brother Frank lost his job in his beloved physics environment. Toni, the gifted linguist daughter of Robert and Kitty, failed to get a job as a UN translator due to the FBI's grudge against the family. The rejection surely contributed to her mental health issues and eventual suicide. I think that accusations that the US government killed Jean Tatlock because of her politics and closeness to Oppenheimer have some merit.

Oppenheimer was not a Communist spy at the heart of the US nuclear programme. He was a gifted scientist and thinker who was brave enough to speak out. He was not a political activist, and once he had lost his position, he retreated from explicit criticisms of the threat of nuclear war. He seems to have made little, or no, comment on US politics - either imperialist or civil rights - in the later years of his life. As a public intellectual he had significant limits.

American Prometheus is certainly the best biography of this complicated man. The authors have done an admirable job in drawing out the factors that shaped Oppenheimer. They are less clear on those factors that shaped the politics of the system that would destroy him, and continues to deploy nuclear weapons today. Nonetheless through this brilliant account we learn a great deal about the politics that have shaped the world that we live in today, and the individuals who built it - as well as created forces that could destroy it all. A great biography should always leave the reader feeling like they've lived the triumph and/or tragedy of its subject. American Prometheus certainly does that.