
Los Alamos
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Edward Herrmann
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By:
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Joseph Kanon
About this listen
New York Times best seller • "The suspense novel for all others to beat...[a] must read." (The Denver Post)
Winner of the Edgar Award for Best First Novel
It is the spring of 1945, and in a dusty, remote community, the world’s most brilliant minds have come together in secret. Their mission: to split an atom and end a war. But among those who have come to Robert Oppenheimer’s "enchanted campus" of foreign-born scientists, baffled guards, and restless wives is a simple man in search of a killer. Michael Connolly has been sent to the middle of nowhere to investigate the murder of a security officer on the Manhattan Project. But amid the glimmering cocktail parties and the staggering genius, Connolly will find more than he bargained for. Sleeping in a dead man’s bed and making love to another man’s wife, Connolly has entered the moral no-man’s-land of Los Alamos. For in this place of brilliance and discovery, hope and horror, Connolly is plunged into a shadowy war with a killer - as the world is about to be changed forever.
Praise for Los Alamos
"A magnificent work of fiction...a love story inside a murder mystery inside perhaps the most significant story of the twentieth century: the making of the atomic bomb." (The Boston Globe)
"Compelling...[Joseph Kanon] pulls the reader into a historical drama of excitement and high moral seriousness." (The New York Times)
"Thrilling...Kanon writes with the sure hand of a veteran and does a marvelous job." (The Washington Post Book World)
©1997 Joseph Kanon (P)1997 Bantam Doubleday Dell Audio Publishing, Bantam Doubleday Dell Audio Publishing, A Division of Random House, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"The atmospherics are exactly right: Los Alamos brings back an era when a secret was really a secret and a lie wasn't necessarily a sin." (Entertainment Weekly)
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stop the music
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Moving Story
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Great period piece, first rate narrator
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Good, but...
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The voices were very similar making it difficult to differentiate the speakers.
unnecessary music
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Compelling story, but flawed audio presentation!
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Set during the final stages of the Manhattan Project, LOS ALAMOS is both classic crime writing and superb historical fiction. Kanon has clearly done extensive research into the personalities and activities that led to the development of the atomic bomb, but he uses that background knowledge judiciously. Rather than being compelled to trot out every fact worth noting about Los Alamos, Kanon respects the reader's intelligence and only uses details that are relevant to the narrative. He introduces people and reports events in a way that suggests that he expects us to have some prior familiarity with them. I'm anything but an expert on the era in question, but his portrait of Robert Oppenheimer as a high-strung, slightly aloof personality feels credible.
IMPORTANT: As many have noted, the sound quality of this recording is execrable, and the music transitions at chapter breaks is horribly distorted. Even so, I would hate for listeners to be turned away from this audiobook because of these limitations. There is a silver lining to the fact that this is an old recording: Edward Herrmann's performance is the kind of commanding voice that we seldom hear anymore. He projects a tone of confident masculinity that today has given way to bombast and bluster. He does very well with accents, the only drawback being that female characters tend to sound a tad like men in drag.
Classic Crime Writing and Fine Historical Fiction
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Slow Start but fascinating
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Horrible recording sound, but story is interesting
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Great book, irritating music
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