Buried Glory (Ebook)
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80% under what the other stores charge
Compared across 3 stores. Prices are checked against each store and labelled with when.
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Buried Glory is Istvan Hargittai's group biography of a dozen leading Soviet scientists, framed by Moscow's Novodevichy Cemetery, where nine of them are buried. Hargittai, a chemist himself, mixes archival research with personal recollection to set their work against Stalin's purges, the nuclear arms race and the antisemitism many faced. It suits readers of Cold War history and the history of science more than readers wanting a general Russian history. Its closest rivals are single-subject biographies of figures like Sakharov; this one trades depth on one life for a dozen linked portraits.
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Lowest price we've seen: $17.50 on Nov 10 at Strand Book Store. Tracked across 3 stores since Nov 10.
Reviewers treat it as a solid, readable introduction to Soviet science under Stalin and after, strongest on the human and political pressures on researchers. Some find the individual portraits too short and uneven.
Buried Glory profiles a dozen eminent Soviet scientists, nine of whom are buried at Moscow's Novodevichy Cemetery. The cemetery, the resting place of figures such as Khrushchev, Yeltsin, Chekhov, Eisenstein, Gogol, and Bulgakov, serves as the book's symbolic starting point. The profiles show both the heights of Soviet research and the decline of science since the collapse of the USSR.
Author Istvan Hargittai is a chemist. He draws on extensive archival research and his own personal memories to place the scientists' achievements against the political backdrop of the Cold War. The book covers Petr L. Kapitza, a Nobel Prize winner who stood up for fellow scientists against Stalin. It also covers Yulii B. Khariton, who ran the secret Soviet nuclear weapons laboratory Arzamas-16, and Andrei D. Sakharov, the "father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb" and a human rights advocate who won the Nobel Peace Prize.
The book also describes the conditions these researchers worked under. In the post-war period, Stalin's anti-Semitism and anti-science measures devastated biology, damaged chemistry, and nearly destroyed physics. Physics survived because Stalin recognized it was needed to build nuclear weapons.