Uranium, Tom Zoellner
Uranium, Tom Zoellner
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Uranium
War, Energy, and the Rock That Shaped the World

Author: Tom Zoellner

Narrator: Patrick Lawlor

Unabridged: 12 hr 58 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 04/20/2009

Synopsis

Uranium is a common element in the earth's crust and the only naturally occurring mineral with the power to end all life on the planet. After World War II, it reshaped the global order—whoever could master uranium could master the world.

Marie Curie gave us hope that uranium would be a miracle panacea, but the Manhattan Project gave us reason to believe that civilization would end with apocalypse. Slave labor camps in Africa and Eastern Europe were built around mine shafts, and America would knowingly send more than 600 uranium miners to their graves in the name of national security.

Fortunes have been made from this yellow dirt; massive energy grids have been run from it. Fear of it panicked the American people into supporting a questionable war with Iraq, and its specter threatens to create another conflict in Iran. Now, some are hoping it can help avoid a global warming catastrophe.

In Uranium, Tom Zoellner takes readers around the globe in this intriguing look at the mineral that can sustain life or destroy it.

About Tom Zoellner

Tom Zoellner is the author or coauthor of nine nonfiction books, the politics editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books, an associate professor of English at Chapman University, and a visiting professor of English at Dartmouth College. His writing has appeared in the Atlantic, Harper's, Men's Health, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and many other places. He is the recipient of fellowships and residencies from The Lannan Foundation, the Corporation of Yaddo, and the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Grumpus on July 01, 2020

This is basically the biography of Uranium. The history of how it was discovered and evolved to what it is today was a great read, especially considering the time we're in with everyone trying to get the bomb. This powerful quote from the book's introduction sums it all up, "From dust to dust, t......more

Goodreads review by Lee on April 19, 2009

I just listened to Uranium: War, Energy and the Rock That Shaped the World by Tom Zoellner. Maybe you know it's radioactive, and maybe you also know the timeframe it went from being an unknown nuisance rock to something that would change the world forever. But do you know where it first came from on......more

Goodreads review by Cav on May 25, 2023

"The mastery and containment of uranium—this Thing we dug up seventy years ago— will almost certainly become one of the defining aspects of twenty-first-century geopolitics..." Uranium was an interesting look into the subject. The scope of the writing here is incredibly broad, and it covers quite a l......more

Goodreads review by Brahm on February 25, 2022

When you search "uranium" in Saskatoon Public Library, this is what comes up. Expectations were low (as they should be for a "shaped the world" book title), but they were exceeded! More weapons-focused than energy, Zoellner does a job job of explaining uranium as an element, its early mining discove......more

Goodreads review by Linda on August 27, 2022

Condensed matter physics is a subject that thinks about strange phenomena in solids, where uranium and uranium containing compounds are arguably the most perplexing--this was the uranium I knew from a very focused, physics point of view. Zoellner's book has shown me this mysterious element in a much......more

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