Martin J. Sherwin has 3 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 3 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 5 ratings. The most-rated is American Prometheus.
American Prometheus
Summary
Pulitzer Prize, Biography/Autobiography, 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award, Biography, 2006 J. Robert Oppenheimer is one of the iconic figures of the 20th 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, 25 years in the making, the authors capture Oppenheimer's life and times, from his early career to his central role in the Cold War.
©2005 Kai Bird; 2007 Blackstone Audio Inc.
Gambling with Armageddon
Summary
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer comes the first effort to set the Cuban Missile Crisis, with its potential for nuclear holocaust, in a wider historical narrative of the Cold War - how such a crisis arose and why at the very last possible moment it didn't happen. In this groundbreaking look at the Cuban Missile Crisis, Martin Sherwin not only gives us a riveting, sometimes hour-by-hour explanation of the crisis itself, but also explores the origins, scope, and consequences of the evolving place of nuclear weapons in the post-World War II world. Mining new sources and materials and going far beyond the scope of earlier works on this critical face-off between the United States and the Soviet Union - triggered when Khrushchev began installing missiles in Cuba at Castro's behest - Sherwin shows how this volatile event was an integral part of the wider Cold War and was a consequence of nuclear arms. Gambling with Armageddon looks in particular at the original debate in the Truman administration about using the atomic bomb; the way in which President Eisenhower relied on the threat of massive retaliation to project US power in the early Cold War era; and how President Kennedy, though unprepared to deal with the Bay of Pigs debacle, came of age during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Here, too, is a clarifying picture of what was going on in Khrushchev's Soviet Union. Martin Sherwin has spent his career in the study of nuclear weapons and how they have shaped our world. Gambling with Armegeddon is an outstanding capstone to his work thus far.
©2020 Martin J. Sherwin (P)2020 Random House Audio
A World Destroyed
Summary
Continuously in demand since its first, prize-winning edition was published in 1975, this is the classic history of Hiroshima and the origins of the arms race, from the development of the American atomic bomb to the decision to use it against Japan and the beginnings of U.S. atomic diplomacy toward the Soviet Union. In the preface to this edition, the author describes and evaluates the lengthening trail of new evidence that has come to light concerning these often emotionally debated subjects. He also invokes his experience as a historical advisor to the controversial, aborted 1995 Enola Gay exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution, which leads him to analyze the impact on American democracy of one of the most insidious legacies of Hiroshima: the political control of historical interpretation.
©1975 Martin J. Sherwin (P)2010 Blackstone Audio