Martin J. Sherwin, BIO Advisory Council member and Pulitzer Prize-winning coauthor (with Kai Bird) of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, died October 6. He was 84.

Born July 2, 1937, in Brooklyn, Sherwin graduated from James Madison High School and earned a bachelor’s in history from Dartmouth in 1959. He served in the Navy for four years, where he served as an air intelligence officer stationed in San Diego at a time when the United States was locked in great tension with the Soviet Union. He also served in Japan and Hawaii. Sherwin earned a doctorate from the University of California, Los Angeles, in diplomatic history in 1971. His first book, A World Destroyed: The Atomic Bomb and the Grand Alliance, was based on his dissertation work and published in 1975 by Random House. The book explored “the motives, assumptions, and decisions of the scientists, military men, politicians, and diplomats involved in the development and use of the atomic bomb and their impact on the military and diplomatic conduct of World War II.” It became a finalist for the National Book Award for History and Biography.

In 1980, as a faculty member at Tufts University, he established the Nuclear Age History and Humanities Center, which became best known for its Global Classroom Project that connected Tufts students with their counterparts at Moscow State University. In his first year of employment at Tufts, Sherwin began writing the biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer. He once said that his subject’s “ability to transform himself in many ways explains his ability to do what he did in Los Alamos.” Capturing the many reinventions of Oppenheimer, however, proved more difficult than Sherwin once imagined. In a talk at Tufts University shortly after the publication of the biography, he said: “I told my editor it would be finished in five or six years [but I] found biography immensely more difficult than writing a history . . . you are locked in to this person’s life.”

Sherwin spent 20 years researching the Oppenheimer biography. Then, over a friendly dinner in Boston in 2000, he gained a co-author: Kai Bird. Bird, in his obituary for Sherwin published in The Nation, said: “He was still working on the Oppenheimer biography, and it was on this occasion that he invited me to join him on the project. To seal the deal, we raised our martini glasses and Marty gave Oppie’s favored toast: ‘To the confusion of our enemies!’” Their completed work, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer was published by Knopf in 2005. It earned Sherwin and Bird the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Bird said of their partnership, “It was a rare collaboration: We were still friends at the end.”

Sherwin’s cause of death was complications from lung cancer. He is survived by his wife, Susan (Smukler) Sherwin; his son, Alex; and his sister, Marjorie Sherwin. He is predeceased by his daughter, Andrea Sherwin.

Reflecting on his friend and collaborator, Bird said, “He was such a decent man and a great biographer.”

 

Alan Emmet, the author and English garden historian, died on October 9. She was 94.

Emmet, born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1927, was the author of numerous books on English gardening, including So Fine a Prospect: Historic New England Gardens (UPNE, 1996), which environmental journalist Michael Pollan credited for “bringing together the insights of the social historian, the biographer and the gardener.” Emmet was a 1950 graduate of Radcliffe College and went on to work for the Harvard Graduate School of Design and complete the Historic Landscapes Report on how Harvard might best care for and maintain its wide array of gardens and historic properties.

 

Carlos Mark Castillo, who produced, wrote, and directed the biographical documentary of boxer Bobby Chacon, died September 29. He was 57.

Castillo passed away of cardiac arrest on September 29, in Petaluma, California. He graduated from California State University, Fresno, with a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism in 1987. Castillo held jobs writing for various commercial publications and also owned and operated The Loveable Rogue Bookstore in Novato, California. He was the producer, writer, and director of the biographical documentary Schoolboy, about former world champion boxer Bobby Chacon.