Martin Sherwin, Prize-winning Biographer of Oppenheimer, Dies at 84

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Martin Sherwin, Prize-winning Biographer of Oppenheimer, Dies at 84

Examining “American Prometheus,” Janet Maslin of The New York Moments described it as “a work of voluminous scholarship and lucid perception, unifying its multifaceted portrait with a keen grasp of Oppenheimer’s critical mother nature.”

That nature, she wrote, expressed alone in “charm and bravado on the surface, Dostoyevskian darkness beneath.”

Martin Jay Sherwin was born on July 2, 1937, in Brooklyn to Harold and Mimi (Karp) Sherwin. His father was a children’s outfits company, and his mother was a homemaker who worked as a secretary to enable pay out for her son’s faculty tuition.

Right after graduating from James Madison Higher School, he enrolled in Dartmouth intending to go after a profession in drugs, then dabbled in geology and philosophy. He ended up graduating with a bachelor’s diploma in record in 1959.

He served in the Navy as an intelligence officer in Japan and Hawaii, then gained a doctorate in diplomatic record in 1971 at the University of California, Los Angeles. His dissertation turned the basis for “A Earth Wrecked,” his initial e-book, which proposed that President Harry S. Truman’s selection to use atomic weapons had fewer to do with ending the war than with intimidating the Soviets.

In 1980, Dr. Sherwin joined the school of Tufts College, exactly where he recognized the Nuclear Age Heritage and Humanities Centre. He and Evgeny Velikhov, a Russian physicist, established up a job in which pupils and scholars at Tufts and Moscow Point out College came collectively by satellite Television set. Dr. Sherwin retired from Tufts in 2007 as professor emeritus. He also taught at George Mason and Princeton Universities.

In addition to his spouse, Susan (Smukler) Sherwin, he is survived by a son, Alex a sister, Marjorie Sherwin and four grandchildren. His daughter, Andrea Sherwin, died of cancer in 2010.