Stalin and the Scientists

Fülszöveg

From countless sources and with an eye to:^ world events, Simon Ings weaves together: what happened when, early in the twentieth century, a handful of impoverished and underemployed graduates, professors and entrepreneurs, collectors and charlatans, bound themselves to a weak and failing government to create a world superpower. He goes on to reveal how Stalin's philosophical obsessions - and his role as the state's Great Scientist - derailed the Soviet Union's great experiment in 'rational government'.
Stalin and the Scientists' cast of characters operates on a heroic scale: from the biologist taking notes on the physiological effects of his own death sentence, to the botanist delivering scientific lectures in a lightless underground cell while his wife, none the wiser, sent food parcels to the wrong side of Russia; from the biologist who resorted to theft, fraud and kidnap to support ' ' his work, to the poet-ergonomist building a machine - an actual machine, with pulleys and... Tovább

Fülszöveg

From countless sources and with an eye to:^ world events, Simon Ings weaves together: what happened when, early in the twentieth century, a handful of impoverished and underemployed graduates, professors and entrepreneurs, collectors and charlatans, bound themselves to a weak and failing government to create a world superpower. He goes on to reveal how Stalin's philosophical obsessions - and his role as the state's Great Scientist - derailed the Soviet Union's great experiment in 'rational government'.
Stalin and the Scientists' cast of characters operates on a heroic scale: from the biologist taking notes on the physiological effects of his own death sentence, to the botanist delivering scientific lectures in a lightless underground cell while his wife, none the wiser, sent food parcels to the wrong side of Russia; from the biologist who resorted to theft, fraud and kidnap to support ' ' his work, to the poet-ergonomist building a machine - an actual machine, with pulleys and ropes - to churn out new forms of human being. "
By Stalin's death in 1953 the Soviet Union's sciences were the largest and best-funded in'' history - and were at once the glory and the laughing stock of the intellectual world.
Simon Ings is the arts editor of New Scientist magazine. His novels include The Weight of Numbers and Wolves. His science writing includes The Eye: a Natural History. He divides his time between a sweltering glass-walled penthouse in Dubai and what may be London's coldest flat, writing and reviewing for broadsheets and magazines including Nature and The Spectator. He blogs sporadically at www.simonings.com Vissza