Tuxedo Park: Book summary and reviews of Tuxedo Park by Jennet Conant

Tuxedo Park Summary

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.

Tuxedo Park Reviews

"Those interested in science or WWII history will appreciate this well-researched bio." - Publishers Weekly.

"Conant is so good at capturing the high-spirited, freewheeling methodology brought to bear on the many critical research projects that one sometimes forgets that the precocious upstarts behind the method were greatly responsible for saving the world from fascism. Highly recommended" - Library Journal.

"Remarkable and remarkably told, as if F. Scott Fitzgerald had penned Batman. " - Kirkus Reviews

"Her group portrait offers a healthy reminder of how much good science depends on community and collaboration, not solitary genius." - New Yorker.

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Jennet Conant Author Biography

Jennet Conant is the author of the 109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos and Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II. A former journalist, 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.

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