Arts & Photography
Audio CDs
Audiocassettes
Biographies & Memoirs
Business & Investing
Children's Books
Christianity
Comics & Graphic Novels
Computers & Internet
Cooking, Food & Wine
Entertainment
Gay & Lesbian
Health, Mind & Body
History
Home & Garden
Horror
Literature & Fiction
Mystery & Thrillers
Nonfiction
Outdoors & Nature
Parenting & Families
Professional & Technical
Reference
Religion & Spirituality
Romance
Science
Science Fiction & Fantasy
Sports
Teens
Travel
Women's Fiction
|
 |
Tuxedo Park : A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II |
List Price: $26.00
Your Price: $17.68 |
 |
|
|
|
| Product Info |
Reviews |
Description:
This must have been an extremely difficult book to write. Its subject, Alfred Loomis, never gave interviews during his lifetime and destroyed all his papers before his death. "Few men of Loomis' prominence and achievement have gone to greater lengths to foil history," writes author Jennet Conant. Had he not done these things, his name would be better known--and this probably wouldn't be the first biography about him. So who was Alfred Loomis? "He was too complex to categorize--financier, philanthropist, society figure, physicist, inventor, amateur, dilettante--a contradiction in terms," writes Conant. Loomis established a private laboratory in New York and hired scientists whose work in the 1930s wound up making possible both the radar and the atomic bomb. These developments were essential to Allied victory in the Second World War. Conant is perhaps the only person who could have pierced Loomis's obsessive secrecy and written this book; she grew up with Loomis's children and other members of his family. Her grandfather, Harvard president James Bryant Conant, was one of Loomis's scientists. Tuxedo Park is an important book about the development of military technology in the United States; admirers of The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes and similar titles won't want to miss it. --John Miller
|
|
|
|
