Tuxedo Park by Jennet Conant (2003, Paperback, Reprint)

The Untold Story of the American Entrepreneur Who Helped Build the Atomic Bomb and Defeat the Nazis.

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.

Industry Reviews
"By the time you are finished, you are prepared to bestow on Alfred Lee Loomis the title of Most Interesting Man I Never Knew Anything About....Loomis and Conant are just right for each other. She has a fluid writing style, though the book's jaunty pace slows at times."
New York Times Book Review - Alex Beam (06/16/2002)

"[A] brisk, entertaining biography...."
New Yorker (06/10/2002)