Download The Age of Radiance: The Epic Rise and Dramatic Fall of the Atomic Era AudioBook Free
From the New York Times best-selling writer of Rocket Men and the award-winning biographer of Thomas Paine comes the first complete history of the Atomic Time, a brilliant, magisterial profile of the women and men who uncovered the secrets of the nucleus, brought its power to America, and ignited the 20th hundred years. When Marie Curie, Enrico Fermi, and Edward Teller forged the science of radioactivity, they created a revolution that arced from the finish of the 19th hundred years, through the span of World Conflict II and the Cool Conflict of superpower brinksmanship, to your own 21st-century confrontation with the problems of nuclear power and proliferation - a history of paradox, wonder, and nightmare. While nuclear science improves our everyday lives - from remedies to microwave technology - radiation's invisible powers can bring about cancer and mobile mayhem. Writing with a biographer's passion, Craig Nelson unlocks one of the great mysteries of the universe in a work that is tragic, triumphant, and above all, fascinating. From the discovery of X-rays in the 1890s, through the labor and birth of nuclear power in an left behind Chicago sports stadium, to the bomb contractors of Los Alamos and the apocalyptic Dr. Strangelove period, Nelson illuminates a pageant of interesting historical characters: Marie and Pierre Curie, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Franklin Roosevelt, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Harry Truman, Curtis LeMay, John F. Kennedy, Robert McNamara, Ronald Reagan, and Mikhail Gorbachev, amongst others. He uncovers how fantastic Jewish researchers fleeing Hitler changed America from a country that created lightbulbs and telephones into the one that split atoms; how the most grotesque tool ever developed could realize Alfred Nobel's lifelong dream of global peace; and exactly how, in our time, emergency staff and low-level power employees fought to contain run-amok nuclear reactors while thinking if indeed they would live or pass away. Radiance defies our common-sense views of mother nature, with its staggering amounts of energy flowing from relatively inert rock and matter pulsing in half-lives that transforms into other claims over the course of generations or in the blink of an vision. Radiation is as scary a phrase as cancers, but it's the power that will keep our world warm, as well as the power behind earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions, and so organic to all life that even our very own human body are radioactive. By tracing mankind's complicated relationship with the dangerous energy it found out and unleashed, Nelson uncovers how atomic power and rays are indivisible from our everyday lives. Brilliantly told and masterfully constructed, The Time of Radiance offers a new understanding of a misunderstood epoch in history and restores to prominence the ignored heroes and heroines who have changed all of our lives for better and then for worse. It confirms Craig Nelson's position among the most energetic and skillful popular historians writing today.
