American Prometheus
The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
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Narrated by:
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Jeff Cummings
About this listen
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • The definitive biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the iconic figures of the twentieth century, a brilliant physicist who led the effort to build the atomic bomb for his country in a time of war, and who later found himself confronting the moral consequences of scientific progress.
THE INSPIRATION FOR THE MAJOR MOTION PICTURE OPPENHEIMER
J. Robert Oppenheimer is one of the iconic figures of the twentieth century, a brilliant physicist who led the effort to build the atomic bomb for his country in a time of war and who later found himself confronting the moral consequences of scientific progress.
When he proposed international controls over atomic materials, opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb, and criticized plans for a nuclear war, his ideas were anathema to powerful advocates of a massive nuclear buildup during the anti-Communist hysteria of the early 1950s. They declared that Oppenheimer could not be trusted with America’s nuclear secrets.
In this magisterial biography twenty-five years in the making, which won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for biography, the authors capture Oppenheimer’s life and times, from his early career to his central role in the Cold War.
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The fascinating, improbable true story of Maxwell Knight - the great MI5 spymaster and inspiration for the James Bond character M. Maxwell Knight was perhaps the greatest spymaster in history. He did more than anyone in his era to combat the rising threat of fascism in Britain during World War II, in spite of his own history inside this movement. He was also truly eccentric - a thrice-married jazz aficionado who kept a menagerie of exotic pets - and almost totally unqualified for espionage. Yet he had a gift for turning practically anyone into a fearless secret agent.
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Outstanding in every way!
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Counselor
- A Life at the Edge of History
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Ted Sorensen, John F. Kennedy's closest advisor, recounts in full, for the first time, his experience counseling Kennedy through some of the most dramatic moments in American history. Rising from legislative assistant to speechwriter and advisor, the young lawyer from Nebraska worked closely with JFK on his most important speeches, as well as his book Profiles in Courage. Sorensen encouraged the junior senator's political ambitions and was later named special counsel to the president.
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Rare Insight
- By Robert on 05-10-08
By: Ted Sorensen
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The Irregulars
- Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington
- By: Jennet Conant
- Narrated by: Simon Prebble
- Length: 11 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Prior to the U.S. entering WWII, a small coterie of British spies in Washington, D.C., was formed. They called themselves the Baker Street Irregulars after the band of street urchins who were the eyes and ears of Sherlock Holmes in some Arthur Conan Doyle stories.
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Spying in Washington
- By Sara on 10-03-14
By: Jennet Conant
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Gorbachev
- His Life and Times
- By: William Taubman
- Narrated by: Henry Strozier
- Length: 32 hrs and 46 mins
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When Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, the USSR was one of the world's two superpowers. By 1989, his liberal policies of perestroika and glasnost had permanently transformed Soviet Communism and had made enemies of radicals on the right and left. By 1990 he, more than anyone else, had ended the Cold War, and in 1991, after barely escaping from a coup attempt, he unintentionally presided over the collapse of the Soviet Union he had tried to save.
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The Man Who Changed The Course Of History
- By Jean on 12-30-17
By: William Taubman
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A Cruel and Shocking Act
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A groundbreaking, explosive account of the Kennedy assassination that will rewrite the history of the 20th century's most controversial murder investigation. The questions have haunted our nation for half a century: Was the President killed by a single gunman? Was Lee Harvey Oswald part of a conspiracy? Did the Warren Commission discover the whole truth of what happened on November 22, 1963? Philip Shenon, a veteran investigative journalist who spent most of his career at The New York Times, finally provides many of the answers.
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Mainline Propaganda to Dispel Alternate Views
- By Jason K. Woodburn on 02-03-16
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Ike and Dick
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Richard Nixon was a young Navy officer when he first saw Dwight D. Eisenhower through a storm of tickertape as Manhattan celebrated the end of the war in Europe. Seven years later, Nixon was Eisenhower's running mate on the Republican presidential ticket-the beginning of a political and personal relationship that lasted for nearly twenty years. Despite a gulf that separated them by age and temperament, their association evolved into a collaboration that helped to shape the nation's political ideology.
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He's against NIxon
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A Woman in Charge
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Carl Bernstein's stunning portrait of Hillary Rodham Clinton shows us, as nothing else has, the true trajectory of her life and career, with its zigzag bursts of risks taken and safety sought. Marshaling all the skills and energy that propelled his history-making Pulitzer Prize reporting on Watergate, Bernstein gives us the most detailed, sophisticated, comprehensive, and revealing account of Hilary Rodham Clinton yet.
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in depth and well-written
- By Katherine on 07-20-07
By: Carl Bernstein
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Inga
- Kennedy's Great Love, Hitler's Perfect Beauty, and J. Edgar Hoover's Prime Suspect
- By: Scott Farris
- Narrated by: Scott Farris
- Length: 12 hrs and 38 mins
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In addition to her romance with Kennedy, Arvad married four times - including to an Egyptian prince, the brilliant filmmaker Paul Fejos, and the famed cowboy movie star Tim McCoy. She had affairs with Wall Street financier Bernard Baruch, the noted surgeon Dr. William Cahan, and Winston Churchill's right hand man, Baron Robert Boothby. But by all accounts her admirers among the European and American elite loved Inga not for her physical beauty, but for her joie de vivre.
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Excellent Kennedy Read
- By James P. Barraza on 04-14-17
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A Spy Among Friends
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- By: Ben Macintyre
- Narrated by: John Lee
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Who was Kim Philby? Those closest to him—like his fellow MI6 officer and best friend since childhood, Nicholas Elliot, and the CIA’s head of counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton—knew him as a loyal confidant and an unshakeable patriot. Philby was a brilliant and charming man who rose to head Britain’s counterintelligence against the Soviet Union. Together with Elliott and Angleton he stood on the front lines of the Cold War, holding Communism at bay. But he was secretly betraying them both: He was working for the Russians the entire time.
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The narrator is incorrectly identified.
- By Greenlake DD on 07-30-14
By: Ben Macintyre
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Dark Sun
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Richard Rhodes' landmark history of the atomic bomb won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Now, in this majestic new masterpiece of history, science, and politics, he tells for the first time the secret story of how and why the hydrogen bomb was made, and traces the path by which this supreme artifact of 20th-century technology became the defining issue of the Cold War.
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Abridged??
- By Delano on 04-17-13
By: Richard Rhodes
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Going Home to Glory
- A Memoir of Life with Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961-1969
- By: David Eisenhower, Julie Nixon Eisenhower
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
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Performance
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After President Dwight D. Eisenhower left office in 1961, he retired to a farm in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Living next door was his teenage grandson, David; they would be neighbors for the rest of the decade. Based on personal stories, letters, diaries, and the reminiscences of Eisenhower’s closest friends, Going Home to Glory is both an intimate chronicle of the elder statesman’s final years and a coming of age story.
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Wow - Living History - Right Before Our Eyes
- By Amazon Customer on 12-16-11
By: David Eisenhower, and others
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Excellent
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What listeners say about American Prometheus
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
- HHT
- 06-20-07
Interesting history
Very well done, but more detail than you really need to know. It gives a good history of politics and education in the twentieth century.
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11 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Kevin
- 07-12-09
Well worth the listen
26+ hours that went by like *that*. I loved this audiobook.
The narration was very good, but as pointed out by others there are many edits where it's clear they've inserted a patched portion of audio. In some points there is a near constant stream of these patched sections and I found it distracting. There is also a fairly boring stretch (for me, at least) that lasts for perhaps 3 hours just prior to Los Alamos, but overall this is well worth the read.
The focus of the book is the anti-communist witch-hunt (and personal vendetta) carried out against Oppenheimer. There is very little technical information about the building of the atomic bomb, but this did not detract from the fascinating story of his life. By the end of the book, when they get to his security hearing for the Automatic Energy Commission (his "trial" for communist connections), I was transfixed and could not shut this thing off. The testimony given in support of Oppenheimer during the trial was in some cases very moving.
It is a balanced and fair portrait, I feel. I knew nothing about Oppenheimer before reading this account, and I now I feel I know him very well indeed both the good and the bad. First rate biography.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Margaret
- 11-15-13
A Rich Slive of Modern American History
Where does American Prometheus rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?
This was among the best non-fiction books I’ve read in quite awhile. I saw modern American historyfrom a unique perspective. , the subject matter was rich, the writing strong, and the long read was well worth the time.
I selected American Prometheus with the expectation that I would learn about the anti-communism scares of the 1950s and how a famous scientist was harmed in a notorious hearing. In other words, I was prepared for a largely political story – a “tisk-tisk, they should not have done that” courtroom drama of a crucified saint.
This book delivered far more than I expected. In the meticulously researched account of Oppenheimer’s 62 years, it portrays a man who was fascinating for his awesome mental horsepower as well as for his numerous oddities and personal flaws. Certainly, this book tells about a man who ultimately was crucified, but there is no saint here. In some important ways, his personal life was tragic, and the book pulls no punches. Several times, I wanted to reach through the ether and tell him to straighten up his life.
My passion for science helped hold my interest. Oppenheimer began his career at the dawn of quantum physics in the 1920s and dealt with a who’s who of famous scientists: Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Lawrence, and Teller among others. I was fascinated by some behind-the-scenes accounts of these men. Heisenberg’s assignments in Nazi Germany were interpreted by Oppenheimer and others as part of the clues that the Nazis were trying to create an atomic bomb. Einstein had a friendly rivalry with Oppenheimer: they each thought the other was pursuing faulty science. Teller despised Oppenheimer—and a lot of scientists did not like Teller.
What did you like best about this story?
I was amazed by how much detail is revealed about the process of designing and building the atomic bomb without revealing top-secret information. The authors focus on the many personalities, the strain of racing against the Germans, and the sometimes humorous stories about academic scientists learning to deal with Army secrecy.
How did the narrator detract from the book?
First, as other reviewers have said, the editing of the audio recording was very poor. I would say it was amateurish. Second, the narrator does not seem to listen to himself. I was distracted by his switching from a dispassionate narrator voice to conversational, emotional voices.
Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?
One tidbit will stick with me always: the name “Trinity” given to the site of the first test bomb is not a Biblical reference as I had thought. Oppenheimer chose the name from an ancient Sanskrit account of three gods, one of whom says “now I am Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
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- Andrew Merritt
- 02-19-20
Quality Book with OK Recording
The book is incredibly in depth and is very much worth the listen. My only qualm is that it appeared to me that the Narrator of the audio book had mispronounced many of the names of key characters and places and went back and re-recorded them. The new recordings were dropped in and they don't match the tone and quality of the rest of the book. It is a fairly regular occurrence throughout the book and I found it distracting.
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- J. C.
- 06-17-20
Tragic
Oppenheimer is a model for my life. I aspire to be intellectual and useful, but somehow I keep getting pushed back. Although my life is not nearly as useful as Oppenheimer's, it is also, fortunately, not nearly as tragic
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- Matt Hutson
- 08-30-23
A touching tribute to Oppenheimer
I'm so happy to have read this book. After watching the recent 2023 film entitled Oppenheimer by Christopher Nolan.
The book filled in many of the gaps that the film could not cover. And by the end, I actually had a few tears starting to Well up in my eyes. Although very long, I enjoyed every single second of the book and I feel like any person that wants to know about Oppenheimer's life coming, his struggles and accomplishments, and the way that the government treated. A hero scientist, then you should read this book.
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- Marc
- 09-02-23
Very well researched
This is a very interesting and complete biography including personal and professional aspects. This is an important contribution to the history of the dawning of the nuclear age including policy development, protagonists and antagonists, and the role of science.
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- M. Miller
- 07-29-23
Oppie unbound
Riveting as promised. Pretty even handed about a maddening subject, and not just as some glib motif about quanta and paradox. Makes you want to read books again. For a book as hefty as it’s subject is lean, the pacing is gripping. (Credit the editor!) The narrator mispronounces a few names a few times, but on the whole his recording is impressively consistent as he performs multiple characters and ethnicities over several generations and recording sessions. Does not sound stentorian as it could have, and that made it a nice long term time investment.
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- Jonathan
- 08-09-09
Long but well worth the time
The biography is engaging and energetic. The narration is a bit flat, but not to the point where one wants to give up listening. All in all a lesson worth learning.
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- paul
- 08-29-10
A story little taught, in history or physics
4.5 stars, actually. I found it immensely informative history of Robert Oppenheimer and his times in physics. This is a very different perspective on many of his famous contemporaries. Readers might be interested in visiting the first large scale nuclear reactor, the B Reactor, at Hanford, WA. Tours are now available to the public.
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