Oppie Redux

A lot about J. Robert Oppenheimer has survived an otherwise horrific, but complex, project, of which he was technical leader, the Manhattan Project. He was affectionately known as “Oppie,” self-caricatured in Panama hat atop dangling cigarette, complemented by the skinniest of frames,. The factual story of the Manhattan Project is brilliantly told in Richard Rhodes Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” (1986). The recent box office-hit movie about Oppie brought to film his personal story as described in Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s “American Prometheus: the Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer” (2005). And now Oppie resurfaces in a work of historical fiction by first-time novelist Rachel Robbins, in “The Sound of a Thousand Stars” (2024). Mid-twenties P…