Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II

Jennet Conant

Sep 2018 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by John Kroft

About this audiobook

The untold story of an eccentric Wall Street tycoon and the circle of scientific geniuses he assembled before World War II to develop the science for radar and the atomic bomb. Together they changed the course of history. Legendary financier, philanthropist, and society figure Alfred Lee Loomis gathered the most visionary scientific minds of the twentieth century-Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, and others-at his state-of-the-art laboratory in Tuxedo Park, New York, in the late 1930s. He established a top-secret defense laboratory at MIT and personally bankrolled pioneering research into new, high-powered radar detection systems that helped defeat the German Air Force and U-boats. With Ernest Lawrence, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, he pushed Franklin Delano Roosevelt to fund research in nuclear fission, which led to the development of the atomic bomb. Jennet Conant, the granddaughter of James Bryant Conant, one of the leading scientific advisers of World War II, enjoyed unprecedented access to Loomis' papers, as well as to people intimately involved in his life and work. She pierces through Loomis' obsessive secrecy and illuminates his role in assuring the Allied victory.

About the author

Jennet Conant is the author, most recently, of Fierce Ambition. Her other books include the New York Times bestselling Tuxedo Park, 109 East Palace, The Irregulars, The Great Secret, and the critically acclaimed Man of the Hour. She lives in Sag Harbor, New York.

John Kroft is a New York-based actor and a recent graduate of the Juilliard School. He has performed regionally at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, Eugene O'Neill's National Playwrights conference, the Bay Street Theater, and the Chautauqua Theater Company.