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109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos

Name: 109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos
Author: Jennet Conant
ISBN: 9780743551601

by Jennet Conant, Anne Twomey

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
MP3 Book
ISBN: 9780743551601

Available to Buy

Synopsis of 109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos

They were told as little as possible. Their orders were to go to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and report for work at a classified Manhattan Project site, a location so covert it was known to them only by the mysterious address: 109 East Palace.

They were greeted by Dorothy McKibbin, an attractive widow who was the least likely person imaginable to run a front for a clandestine defense laboratory. They stepped through her threshold into a parallel universe -- the desert hideaway where Robert Oppenheimer and a team of world-famous scientists raced to build the first atomic bomb before Germany and bring World War II to an end.

Despite all the obstacles, Oppie managed to forge a vibrant community at Los Alamos through the sheer force of his personality. Dorothy devoted herself to taking care of him and his crew, and supported him through the terrifying preparations for the test explosion at Trinity and the harrowing aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In this deeply moving account,...

The New Yorker

In 1943, a young widow named Dorothy McKibbin was hired as Oppenheimer’s assistant to run the Santa Fe office of the secret weapons laboratory at Los Alamos. At 109 East Palace Avenue, she greeted newly arrived scientists, reminding them to use their aliases while in town and never to identify themselves as physicists. Conant, whose grandfather was a Manhattan Project administrator, mostly sidesteps political issues to focus on the absurdities of day-to-day life at the desert lab. McKibbin fielded numerous complaints from the scientists’ wives, who had to struggle with massive coal-belching stoves, hand-churned washing machines, and a chronic shortage of diapers. Meanwhile, their husbands, when not handling plutonium, drank heavily and played pranks: once, the operator of the P.A. system was heard paging Werner Heisenberg, who was otherwise engaged, in Germany, designing the Nazi bomb.

About the Author, Jennet Conant

Jennet Conant is the author of 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. 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.