Overview

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.

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Jennet Conant is the author of Man of the Hour and the New York Times bestsellers The Irregulars and Tuxedo Park. She has written for Vanity Fair, Esquire, GQ, Newsweek, and the New York Time. John Kroft is a New York-based actor and a recent graduate of the Juilliard School. He appeared Off-Broadway in Dan Cody's Yacht at Manhattan Theatre Club and has performed regionally at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, Eugene O'Neill's National Playwrights conference, the Bay Street Theater, and the Chautauqua Theater Company. His television credits include Red Oaks (Amazon) and Blue Bloods (CBS). As a narrator John has voiced several novels, including Restart (winner of Best Multi-Voiced Performance, 2018 Audie Awards), Sidetracked, Checked, Pride Wars Part I: The Spinner Prince, and The Possible World.

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