ESC: English Studies in Canada

J. Robert Oppenheimer, the "father of the atomic bomb," has been a subject of academic interest for decades. This is not surprising, given his historical importance. Oppenheimer was a prominent figure in both the Manhattan Project and McCarthyism and is therefore central to histories of both the nuclear age and the Cold War. But scholars have not been the only ones to engage with his story. Oppenheimer has also been the subject of considerable literary and artistic attention, as novelists, filmmakers, graphic artists, comics, and playwrights have dramatized his story as a way to grapple with the meaning of a nuclear world. And while it has taken some time, these two trends—the historiographic and the artistic—have merged. Scholars have now focused on exploring Oppenheimer as a cultural figure in addition to a political and scientific one. Charles Thorpe (2006) and Mark Wolverton (2008) began to explore this territory in their biographies of Oppenheimer, and I have published a study of the origin and meaning of his public image (2015). Lindsey Michael Banco's The Meanings of J. Robert Oppenheimer is a powerful and welcome addition to this literature.

Banco's book demonstrates cross-disciplinary scholarship at its best. He uses the methods of literary criticism to examine a broad range of scholarly, artistic, and literary engagements with Oppenheimer. The first section focuses on textual representations of the famous scientist: biographies, histories, and fiction. Each of these is given its own chapter. For biography, he examines three works published in 2005, the sixtieth anniversary of the Manhattan Project's completion; he focuses much of the analysis on the role of representations of the (New Mexico) desert. Banco compares the rhetorical strategies of the three books and is particularly insightful with his treatment of Jennet Conant's 109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos. Conant tells the story [End Page 185] from the perspective of Dorothy McKibbin, a secretary on the project who did not work in Los Alamos but instead welcomed new recruits arriving at nearby Santa Fe. This allows her, in Banco's words, to be "an oblique portal or gateway into the Oppenheimer narrative rather than a vast, quasi-omniscient, mythological or national vista" (40). As these words suggest, Banco is interested in exploring the possibilities of biography as an art form, as well as the content of each book. In the next chapter, he turns to historical treatments of Oppenheimer. He chooses five examples, three of which were published during the physicist's lifetime. Much as he focused on the importance of the desert in the biographies, Banco finds a unifying theme here as well: heliotropes. Solar images and metaphors have been a recurring theme in depictions of the bomb, and Banco offers productive and thoughtful analyses of how they function alongside depictions of Oppenheimer. In the final chapter of part 1, he turns to fiction, providing excellent and extended close readings of Joseph Kanon's Los Alamos and Lydia Millet's Oh Pure and Radiant Heart. Each is offered as an exemplar of a certain type of Oppenheimer narrative; much as with the biographies analyzed in the first chapter, one embodies traditional narrative and the other challenges it.

In part 2, Banco moves from the textual to the visual; the second part of the book features one chapter on film and television and one on museums. The section opens with a brief analysis of comics and photography, that is, forms that easily straddle the textual/visual line. This sets the stage for chapter 4, in which he analyzes feature films (such as Fat Man and Little Boy) and documentaries (such as the bbc's mini-series, Oppenheimer). Chapter 5 considers Oppenheimer's role in four different museums in the American southwest: the Los Alamos Historical Museum, the Bradbury Science Museum, the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History, and the National Atomic Testing Museum. In several of these museums, Oppenheimer has a relatively minor presence, at least...