James Mahaffey Audiobooks

Atomic Adventures: thirteen hours of nuclear science told as narrative

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.5/5 average

326 listener ratings

Who is James Mahaffey?

Adventures is an unusual word to attach to atomic science, and it does a great deal of work here. Atomic Adventures sets out its stall as narrative rather than textbook, which is the tradition James Mahaffey is writing in as far as our catalogue is concerned: science delivered as a sequence of episodes, with people in them.

The title is filed under science and engineering and nowhere else, so there is no ambiguity about the subject. Thirteen and a half hours confirms the ambition. Popular science at that scale is not a primer.

The response from listeners has been strong across several hundred verdicts, which in technical non-fiction generally means the explanations hold up under pressure.

James Mahaffey in audiobooks

Keith Sellon-Wright reads, and the audiobook runs to just under thirteen and a half hours. Narration matters more than usual in this territory, where a listener has to follow technical detail without the option of glancing back up the page, and the score suggests it has been handled well.

Come to it with time set aside. Thirteen hours of nuclear history is not background listening, and it goes down far better in chapters than in one determined push.

Everything we hold is listed below.