Audiobooks by Jennet Conant

Fierce Ambition: The Life and Legend of War Correspondent Maggie Higgins

Marguerite Higgins was both the scourge and envy of the journalistic world. A longtime reporter for the New York Herald Tribune, she first catapulted to fame with her dramatic account of the liberation of Dachau at the end of World War II. Brash, beautiful, ruthlessly competitive, and sexually adventurous, she forced her way to the front despite being told the combat zone was no place for a woman. While the Herald Tribune exploited her feminine appeal—regularly featuring the photogenic 'girl reporter' on its front pages—it was Maggie's dogged determination, talent for breaking news, and unwavering ambition that brought her success from one war zone to another. Her notoriety soared during the Cold War, and her daring dispatches from Korea garnered a Pulitzer Prize for foreign correspondence—the first granted to a woman for frontline reporting. A star reporter, she became part of the Kennedy brothers' Washington circle, though her personal alliances and politics provoked bitter feuds with male rivals, who vilified her until her untimely death. Drawing on new and extensive research, journalist and historian Jennet Conant restores Maggie's rightful place in history as a woman who paved the way for the next generation of journalists, and one of the greatest war correspondents of her time.

Jennet Conant (Author), Ej Lavery (Narrator)

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The Great Secret: The Classified World War II Disaster that Launched the War on Cancer

On the night of December 2, 1943, the Luftwaffe bombed a critical Allied port in Bari, Italy, sinking seventeen ships and killing over a thousand servicemen and hundreds of civilians. Caught in the surprise air raid was the John Harvey, an American Liberty ship carrying a top-secret cargo of 2,000 mustard bombs to be used in retaliation if the Germans resorted to gas warfare. After young sailors began suddenly dying with mysterious symptoms, Lieutenant Colonel Stewart Alexander, a doctor and chemical weapons expert, was dispatched to investigate. He quickly diagnosed mustard gas exposure, worked in concert to suppress. But Alexander heroically persevered in his investigation. His breakthrough observations about the toxic effects of mustard on white blood cells caught the attention of Colonel Cornelius P. Rhoads-a pioneering research scientist-who recognized that the poison was both a killer and a cure, and was instrumental in ushering in a new era of cancer research. The Great Secret is a remarkable story of how horrific tragedy gave birth to medical triumph.

Jennet Conant (Author), John Kroft (Narrator)

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Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World

The untold story of an eccentric Wall Street tycoon and the circle of scientific geniuses he assembled before World War II to develop the science for radar and the atomic bomb. Together they changed the course of history. 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.

Jennet Conant (Author), John Kroft (Narrator)

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Man of the Hour: James B. Conant, Warrior Scientist

The remarkable life of one of the most influential men of the greatest generation, James B. Conant-a savvy architect of the nuclear age and the Cold War-told by his granddaughter, New York Times bestselling author Jennet Conant. James Bryant Conant was a towering figure. He was at the center of the mammoth threats and challenges of the twentieth century. As a young eminent chemist, he supervised the production of poison gas in WWI. As a controversial president of Harvard University, he was a champion of meritocracy and open admissions. As an advisor to FDR, he led the interventionist cause for US entrance in WWII. During that war, Conant was the administrative director of the Manhattan Project, oversaw the development of the atomic bomb and argued that it be used against the industrial city of Hiroshima in Japan. Later, he urged the Atomic Energy Commission to reject the hydrogen bomb, and devoted the rest of his life to campaigning for international control of atomic weapons. As Eisenhower's high commissioner to Germany, he helped to plan German recovery and was an architect of the United States' Cold War policy. Now New York Times bestselling author Jennet Conant recreates the cataclysmic events of the twentieth century as her grandfather James experienced them. She describes the guilt, fears, and sometimes regret of those who invented and deployed the bombs and the personal toll it took. From the White House to Los Alamos to Harvard University, Man of the Hour is based on hundreds of documents and diaries, interviews with Manhattan Projects scientists, Harvard colleagues, and Conant's friends and family, including her father, James B. Conant's son. This is a very intimate, up-close look at some of the most argued cases of modern times-among them the use of chemical weapons, the decision to drop the bomb, Oppenheimer's fate, the politics of post-war Germany and the Cold War-the repercussions of which are still affecting our world today.

Jennet Conant (Author), Fred Sanders (Narrator)

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A Covert Affair: Julia Child and Paul Child in the OSS

Bestselling author Jennet Conant brings us a stunning account of Julia and Paul Child's experiences as members of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in the Far East during World War II and the tumultuous years when they were caught up in the McCarthy Red spy hunt in the 1950s and behaved with bravery and honor. It is the fascinating portrait of a group of idealistic men and women who were recruited by the citizen spy service, slapped into uniform, and dispatched to wage political warfare in remote outposts in Ceylon, India, and China. The eager, inexperienced 6 foot 2 inch Julia springs to life in these pages, a gangly golf-playing California girl who had never been farther abroad than Tijuana. Single and thirty years old when she joined the staff of Colonel William Donovan, Julia volunteered to be part of the OSS's ambitious mission to develop a secret intelligence network across Southeast Asia. Her first post took her to the mountaintop idyll of Kandy, the headquarters of Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, the supreme commander of combined operations. Julia reveled in the glamour and intrigue of her overseas assignment and lifealtering romance with the much older and more sophisticated Paul Child, who took her on trips into the jungle, introduced her to the joys of curry, and insisted on educating both her mind and palate. A painter drafted to build war rooms, Paul was a colorful, complex personality. Conant uses extracts from his letters in which his sharp eye and droll wit capture the day-to-day confusion, excitement, and improbability of being part of a cloak- and-dagger operation. When Julia and Paul were transferred to Kunming, a rugged outpost at the foot of the Burma Road, they witnessed the chaotic end of the war in China and the beginnings of the Communist revolution that would shake the world. A Covert Affair chronicles their friendship with a brilliant and eccentric array of OSS agents, including Jane Foster, a wealthy, free-spirited artist, and Elizabeth MacDonald, an adventurous young reporter. In Paris after the war, Julia and Paul remained close to their intelligence colleagues as they struggled to start new lives, only to find themselves drawn into a far more terrifying spy drama. Relying on recently unclassified OSS and FBI documents, as well as previously unpublished letters and diaries, Conant vividly depicts a dangerous time in American history, when those who served their country suddenly found themselves called to account for their unpopular opinions and personal relationships.

Jennet Conant (Author), Jan Maxwell (Narrator)

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The Irregulars

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. This group constituted the very beginning of what would become M16, the British version of the CIA, and they helped support the fledgling American intelligence service, known at the time as the OSS. Among them were writers Raold Dahl, Ian Fleming, and the flamboyant Canadian industrialist turned professional saboteur William Stephenson, known by the code name Intrepid, upon whom Fleming would later base his fictional M16 agent James Bond. Richly detailed and carefully researched, Conant's narrative uses never-before-seen wartime letters, diaries and interviews to create a fascinating, lively account of deceit, double dealing and moral ambiguity all in the name of victory."

Jennet Conant (Author), Simon Prebble (Narrator)

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

Jennet Conant (Author), Anne Twomey (Narrator)

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