Finally finished it, Incredibly detailed (obsessively so) mostly I was interested in the post war phase, the treatment he received in the McCarthy era. He was never a revolutionary, he was a reformer and most importantly very patriotic, but his brother Frank , his wife and many of his friends had been/were communists. Not good facing authority, both at the McCarthy hearing and the show trial of the AEC in 1954, where he's publicly humiliated by denying him security clearance. He knew he had been under physical and electronic surveillance by the F.B.I. for many years, which they, Hoover and that complete and utter shithead Lewis Strauss cobbled together to make a "case" to have him ejected. Happily Strauss gets his a few years later
and by the same means he tried to destroy Oppenheimer.
You get a very broad portrait of the man and all his faults, it's impossible not to fall in love with him a little. Days before he was due to have some of his reputation restored and ackowledged, by the President; JFK was asassinated, LBJ does it instead. Einstein with whom he was friends and who was also at Princeton says during all this (paraphrasing here) the trouble with Oppie is he is in love with a woman who doesn't love him back - the United States Government.Would recommend it, but only if that time interests you.
There's one bit that made me laugh, written so earnestly and devoid of irony, Frank his brother(also a physicist) at the McCarthy trial unlike Oppenheimer, refused to name names, he loses his job and has a terrible time, but the authors write, "things were so bad he had to sell one of his Van Goghs to live off" (paraphrasing again). Oh, to be a rich communist.