New books & media
DOI: 10.1063/PT.3.5363
A Compassionate Spy
A Compassionate Spy, Steve James, Magnolia Pictures/Participant, 2023
On the heels of the release of the 2023 biopic Oppenheimer comes yet another story from the Manhattan Project. A Compassionate Spy delves into the life of Theodore Alvin Holtzberg, the youngest scientist recruited to work on the project. As a teenage Harvard University graduate, Ted Hall, as he came to be known, was very concerned about a postwar US monopoly on the atomic bomb. In his efforts to create a balance of power, Hall spied for the Soviet Union and provided vital secrets that led to the Soviets creating a bomb of their own. The documentary provides a glimpse into Hall’s life of spying, his impact on history, and the love shared between him and his wife during their 50-year marriage. —
The MANIAC
The MANIAC, Benjamín Labatut, Penguin Press, 2023, $28.00
Two years after the US release of the Chilean novelist Benjamín Labatut’s breakthrough book, When We Cease to Understand the World, the author has returned with an unofficial sequel. Like its predecessor, The MANIAC is a work of fiction based on reality: It is so experimental that labeling it historical fiction seems to sell it short. It comprises a triptych of stories about Paul Ehrenfest, John von Neumann, and the Go master Lee Sedol’s match with the artificial intelligence AlphaGo. Labatut plays with typography, literary form, and sentence structure throughout the book, the heart of which is a fictionalized oral history about von Neumann. Told from the perspective of colleagues such as Eugene Wigner and family members such as his daughter Marina, it examines the Hungarian’s polymathic brilliance, his famously eccentric personality, and the mental anguish he experienced during his terminal bout with cancer. As always, Labatut’s prose dazzles. —
