"Robert Oppenheimer - A Life Inside the Center," by Ray Monk - NYTimes.com J. Robert Oppenheimer helped shift the center of theoretical physics from Europe to California. Ray Monk had begun work on his J. Robert Oppenheimer biography in 2005, when Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin's "American Prometheus" was published. That book, billed as "the first full-scale biography" of Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist, gave Mr. Monk good reason to worry. It covers scientific, historical, moral, political and personal aspects of Oppenheimer's life, conveying his arrogance, brilliance, self-destructiveness and lady-killing charisma. What gaps remained for Mr. Monk to fill? The introduction to Mr. Monk's "Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center" cites at least one of them: physics. "One would never know from reading Bird and Sherwin's book how much of Oppenheimer's time and intellectual energy was taken up with thinking about mesons," Mr. Monk writes sniffily, noting that the subatomic particle does not even appear in Bird and Sherwin's index. Mr. Monk's own book mentions "Thirty Years of Mesons," a lecture delivered by Oppenheimer in 1966 to the American Physical Society. And according to his index, Mr. Monk gives the meson its due on at least 21 out of 695 pages. This is a strange way for Mr. Monk to compete. He is a professor of philosophy, with excellent books about Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell to his credit. And he is not a great explicator of physics, merely a not-bad one. Would anyone seriously interested in Oppenheimer seek out a biography for this?: "What, really, is an electron? A particle? A wave? Could it possibly be both? Might it possibly be neither? How should one, if indeed one should at all, picture an electron and its movements? It's also odd that Mr. Monk adopts a vaguely atomic metaphor to describe Oppenheimer's life. His book appeared in England under the main title "In the Centre," as if Oppenheimer were a nucleus and not a person. Time and again he hits that analogy hard, emphasizing the importance of logistics in Oppenheimer's personal and intellectual life. It's true that he played the crucial role in secret atomic research conducted in Los Alamos, N.M., and that he would never escape central responsibility for creating the atomic bomb. But Mr. Monk takes a needlessly mechanistic approach to a man who has seemed much more interestingly human in other, keener studies. This lengthy book does aspire to be more comprehensive than earlier volumes. Before Oppenheimer even makes his entrance into Mr. Monk's narrative, much has been said about the German-Jewish tradition into which he was born, the privilege that allowed him to be so aloof and the Ethical Culture beliefs that shaped his family and education. Mr. Monk also writes at length about anti-Semitism and the kinds of Jews who practiced it, with Oppenheimer among them. As part of his overall arrogance and superciliousness, Oppenheimer allowed himself to be treated as the antithesis of a Jewish stereotype. He grew from, in his own words, "an unctuous, repulsively good little boy" into such an urbane prodigy that Harvard never bothered to discriminate against him. A quota system applied to Jews in 1922, when Oppenheimer arrived there. In the earlier, formative chapters, which are better than the book's treks over the best-known, most public part of Oppenheimer's adult life, Mr. Monk also illustrates how easily Oppenheimer's snobbery trumped anybody else's. "Instead of 5,000 keen, intellectually alive, well-read young men who have come here to think out ideas and to learn the ideas of others," he complained about his fellow Harvard students, "I find 5,000 tawdry yokels, yanked from fat farms and snoring small towns, to bellow at ball games." Nonetheless, Mr. Monk believes Oppenheimer was intimidated by the broad sophistication he found at Harvard and later Cambridge. Not until he arrived at Göttingen University in 1926, at the age of 22, did he feel free of academic elitism, in a place without "the weight of 700 years of tradition bearing down upon it." By this point in his book, Mr. Monk has begun to explain quantum physics and drop the names of the heavyweights. Here is a book that ticks off the reactions of Einstein, Planck, Heisenberg, Born and Dirac to Schrödinger's "wave mechanics," and shows how remarkably smoothly Oppenheimer insinuated himself into those ranks. The 1927 "On the Quantum Theory of Molecules" which he co-wrote with Max Born, may not have been one of Born's greatest hits, but it became one of Oppenheimer's better-known works. Without Mr. Monk, many readers interested in Oppenheimer's life might not have known that at all. Mr. Monk does a strong job of explaining how Oppenheimer, with unwanted assistance from Nazi Germany, helped shift the center of theoretical physics from Europe to California (he taught at both Berkeley and Caltech). That shift leads the book to Los Alamos during wartime, though it is notably more colorless than other accounts of the guarded community there. The familiarity continues through the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the conscience-searing effects on Oppenheimer of his breakthroughs in the science of mass destruction. Mr. Monk gives very detailed accounts of F.B.I. surveillance of Oppenheimer and those around him. And he replays Oppenheimer's familiar, contorted, much-dramatized testimony to the Atomic Energy Commission hearings in 1954, which stripped him of his security clearance and branded him a risk to national security. The remainder of Mr. Monk's book describes Oppenheimer's relatively glamorous years leading the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., the ongoing debate about his reputation, and the growing infrequency of his appearances as a public figure. "Thirty Years of Mesons" notwithstanding, he withdrew into a life that is only sketchily explained here. It is typical of Mr. Monk's distanced view of his subject that he writes this, in conclusion, about Oppenheimer's wife and two children: "Oppenheimer loved Kitty, Toni and Peter, but he was never able to be the reliably affectionate husband or father they needed him to be. The problems he had as a child forming close bonds with other people had remained with him throughout his life. Though Oppenheimer left behind nearly 300 boxes of papers, Mr. Monk says they contain "remarkably little that gives away anything of an intimate nature." That's hard to believe. Other biographers have seen Oppenheimer at closer range, in living color.