109 East Palace - by Jennet Conant (Paperback)

About the Book

From the author of the bestselling "Tuxedo Park" comes the story of those thousands who came to a secret desert, where the world's leading physicists raced to invent the atomic bomb and bring World War II to an end. Winner of the MPBA award for adult fiction.

Book Synopsis

From the bestselling author of Tuxedo Park, the story of the three-thousand people who lived together in near confinement for twenty-seven intense months under J. Robert Oppenheimer and the world's best scientists to produce the atomic bomb and win World War II.In 1943, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the brilliant, charismatic head of the Manhattan Project, recruited scientists to live as virtual prisoners of the U.S. government at Los Alamos, a barren mesa thirty-five miles outside Santa Fe, New Mexico. Thousands of men, women, and children spent the war years sequestered in this top-secret military facility. They lied to friends and family about where they were going and what they were doing, and then disappeared into the desert. Through the eyes of a young Santa Fe widow who was one of Oppenheimer's first recruits, we see how, for all his flaws, he developed into an inspiring leader and motivated all those involved in the Los Alamos project to make a supreme effort and achieve the unthinkable.

Review Quotes

"The Manhattan Project was a chapter of history rich in the drama of human strengths and frailties, as Jennet Conant chronicles in her illuminating 109 East Palace.... Yet, for all the doubts and hardships, the scientists and workers at Los Alamos were part of something extraordinary.... Thanks to Conant's vivid book, we understand why." -- BusinessWeek

About the Author

Jennet Conant is the author of Man of the Hour: James B. Conant, Warrior Scientist, and the New York Times bestsellers The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington and Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II. She has written for Vanity Fair, Esquire, GQ, Newsweek, and The New York Times. She lives in New York City and Sag Harbor, New York.