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

Written by Jennet Conant

Narrated by Anne Twomey

From the bestselling author of Tuxedo Park, the extraordinary story of the thousands of people who were sequestered in a military facility in the desert for twenty-seven intense months under J. Robert Oppenheimer where the world's best scientists raced to invent 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
• Release date: May 3, 2005
• ISBN: 9780743551601

Jennet Conant

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.

Reviews for 109 East Palace

[Tom McDonough · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Fascinating, unusual perspective on Oppenheimer and the Manhattan project.— TomSpace

[Karla · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Extremely well written and fast paced offers a different perspective

[rennerra · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Excellent story of Los Alamos. Gave you a real sense what it was like to live and work there during the Manhattan Project years.

[dhbarry_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I'm only about halfway through the book, but this is fascinating stuff. A really great read.It's not much for the science; it's all about Oppenheimer himself, and Leslie Groves, and the other physicists and machinists and engineers... The personalities. A truly terrific book. I would recommend it for any fan of history.It's funny; the atomic bomb has been around for some time now. And of course everyone knows at least the general outlines of the story of Los Alamos and Oppenheimer, the Manhattan Project, Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the Enola Gay... Nothing new, right?But this book puts it all into a different light. It makes the history human. All of these things are part of history; they happened in our fairly recent past. Not only that, but they are a significant part of history. No obscure battles in some country that no longer exists, lost in the mists of centuries. This was less than seventy years ago, and these events changed the world in ways that echo even now.This book shares with you the thoughts and dreams and fears of those who made that history. How they lived, what they hoped for, why they felt compelled to do what they did....This is an incredible story, and I'm enjoying it immensely. I would really highly recommend this book.

[iammbb · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Whilst in Santa Fe this summer, we picked up a couple of books about Los Alamos and Robert Oppenheimer.109 East Palace serves as an interesting and illuminating, if not stellar, social history about the creation of and living conditions at Los Alamos.Using Dorothy McKibben, the Santa Fean who ran the small office which served as the entry point for the secret Los Alamos installation, as the entry point for the story, Conant's first intention seems to be to provide us with the look and feel of the war time home of many of the best scientific minds of the era. As long as she is working towards this end, her book works.However, as she strays from this goal and begins to try to become more of an overall historian of the overarching events put into motion at Los Alamos, the book loses its focus and suffers from superficiality.This superficiality became brutally apparent upon reading just a few pages of the other book we purchased in Santa Fe, American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin.In comparison, American Prometheus is clearly the better crafted project but, considered on its own, 109 East Palace is a supremely serviceable entry into the subject matter.

[Steven Stankevitz · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Great read. Could not put it down. Thanks again Steve

[Michael Steger · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An excellent reading of a worthwhile abridged version of a very good book. Even in this abridged version, one gets a sense of what life was like at Los Alamos during the development of the atomic bomb, and gets a somewhat close and personal view of that mysterious, complex, and charismatic figure, Oppenheimer.

[jared_runck · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This fascinating book by the granddaughter of James B. Conant, who administrated the Manhattan Project, tells the "human story" of the creation of Los Alamos National Laboratory and the development of the nuclear bomb near the end of World War II. Though the story is framed as an account of Dorothy McKibbin, the administrator who ran the "front office" of the secret wartime lab at the Santa Fe address that serves as the book's title, it is clearly an homage to J. Robert Oppenheimer and his leadership of the wartime effort.Conant creates wonderfully vibrant characters out of what were perhaps the oddest assortment of geniuses ever assembled. It would have been very easy for the book to become little more than a side show of mad scientists, but Conant's passion for the story keeps the inevitable quirkiness authentic and, well, lovable. Genius scientists are rarely known for their "people skills" (Oppenheimer being a grand exception), but Conant is exceptionally sympathetic in her portrayal of these often difficult personalities. The one glaring exception is her portrayal of Edward Teller, who she clearly disdains. This is not a book about the A-bomb...it is a book about the community that created the A-bomb under some of the most unusual and strenuous circumstances humans could endure.I found particularly gratifying her discussion of the immediate aftermath of Los Alamos' success, describing fully the way the various key scientists reacted to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Her portrayal of the moral ambiguity of that moment is a great moment to consider the ever more tangled web of technological advancement, militaristic foreign policy, and political expediency. In her telling, Oppenheimer's exceptionalism is rooted in his early and keen perception of the moral dilemma created by atomic energy, summarized by his famous quote after the successful test of the first atomic bomb: "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." Conant's carrying of the story into the McCarthy era, the revocation of Oppenheimer's security clearance and consultancy at the Atomic Energy Commission feels, to be honest, as if it goes a bit "beyond" where the story could have (perhaps should have) ended. And it is in that final section that her "crusading" for Oppenheimer's reputation as a great scientist and a great American--as well as her most damning remarks about Edward Teller's lack of character--becomes most strident. It's as if she wishes to provide the defense that her grandfather was unable to effectively mount at the height of the "Red Scare" of the 1950s. I've always been fascinated by biographies of "great minds," so this book was fascinating in its incisive explorations of a COMMUNITY of such minds and how they interacted and reacted to each other. Conant does a tremendous job of drawing the reader into that story and making the reader care more about what happened to the people than about what happened to the project. It was a book long in the finishing, but a book that was worthy of the time.

[gbelik_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

While this book spends enough time on the history and science of the Manhattan Project to set its place in time and history, the joy for me was in the story of the people involved and their interaction in the remarkable closed community of Los Alamos during the production of the atom bomb. I recently visited Santa Fe and stopped to look at the door to 109 East Palace, where new employees reported after they were told merely...."Come to Santa Fe, your nation needs you." The office was run by Dorothy McKibben, a young widow who devoted herself to the project and to its leader, Robert Oppenheimer, and whose unpublished autobiography is a major source for this book. The project grew and grew till there were thousands of people living at Los Alamos; they were isolated and sworn to total secrecy during the course of the project. It is an amazing story and very well told here.