Editorial Reviews
The New York Review of Books, Robert Cottrell
The history of Akademgorodok provides Mr. Josephson with the basis for a study of Soviet science that is marvelously well judged in its scope. He is able to capture in persuasive detail not only the qualities of Soviet science at some of its greatest moments, involving some of its greatest practitioners, but also the material, social, political, and financial conditions in which an evolving group of Soviet scientists lived and worked. His travels through these hinterlands tell much about the Soviet way of doing more things than science alone.
Card catalog description
In 1958 construction began on Akademgorodok, a scientific utopian community modeled after Francis Bacon's vision of a "New Atlantis." The city, carved out of a Siberian forest, 2,500 miles east of Moscow, was formed by Soviet scientists with the full support of Nikita Khrushchev. They believed that their rational science, liberated from ideological and economic constraints, would help their country surpass the West in all fields. In a lively history of this city, itself a symbol of de-Stalinization, Paul Josephson offers the most complete analysis available of the reasons behind the successes and failures of Soviet science - from advances in nuclear physics to politically induced setbacks in research on recombinant DNA.
New Atlantis Revisited,Paul R. Josephson,Princeton University Press,0691044546,Akademgorodok (Novosibirsk),Europe - Russia & the Former Soviet Union,History,History Of Science,Political History,Politics and government,Russia (Federation),Science,Science/Mathematics
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