Overview

Tim Koeth peered into the crumpled brown paper lunch bag; inside was a surprisingly heavy black metal cube. He recognized the mysterious object instantly--he had one just like it sitting on his desk at home. It was uranium metal, taken from the nuclear reactor that Nazi scientists had tried--and failed--to build at the end of World War II. This unexpected gift, wrapped in a piece of paper inscribed with a few cryptic but crucial lines, would launch Koeth, a nuclear physicist and professor, and his colleague Miriam Hiebert, a cultural heritage scientist, on an odyssey to trace the tale of these cubes--two of the original 664 on which the Third Reich had pinned their nuclear ambitions. From Werner Heisenberg and Germany's nuclear program to the Curies, the first family of nuclear physics, to the Allied Alsos Mission's infiltration of Germany to capture Nazi science to the renegade geologists of Murray Hill scouring the globe for uranium, the cubes are lodestars that illuminate a little-known--and hugely consequential--chapter of history. The cubes are physical testimony to the stories of the German failure, and the successful American program that launched the world into the modern nuclear age, and the lessons for modern science that the contrast in these two programs has to offer.

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"""Only a few of these cubes still exist, and Miriam Hiebert leads readers through the compelling detective story of their origin and fates."" -- ""Bruce Cameron Reed, author of Manhattan Project"""

Author Information

Miriam E. Hiebert was first introduced to cultural heritage science at the University of Richmond. While completing her BS in chemistry, she participated in the conservation of an Egyptian mummy, Ti Ameny Net. During her graduate work in materials science and engineering at the University of Maryland, she met Tim Koeth and became interested in nuclear history. Hiebert currently works as a researcher at the Smithsonian on a multiyear survey of glass collections. She lives in Laurel, Maryland. Wendy Tremont King, a classically trained narrator and stage actor, got her start in audiobook narration as a volunteer for the Lighthouse for the Blind. She is an accomplished puppeteer and puppetry director, as well as a member of the SAG Foundation BookPals program for children's literacy.

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