The Red Rockets' Glare: Spaceflight and the Russian Imagination, 1857-1957 (Cambridge Centennial of Flight)
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.59 (927 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 1107639328 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 418 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2014-11-24 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Jenks, The Russian Review"Based on massive research in the Russian Academy of Sciences archive; the economic, military, and scientific-documentation archives of the Soviet state; and a huge amount of published material, Red Rocket's Glare not only tells its fascinating story well, but is of such high intellectual rigor as to transcend the boundaries of several historical categories and genres." -Lewis H. "Asif Siddiqi, who has already written the best books on the Soviet space effort, has now given us a wonderful exploration of the social and cultural dimensions of this effort; he has given voice to those on the periphery: the populist phenomena of utopian ideas and popular imagination." - Loren Graham, Professor Emeritus of the History of Science, MIT, and currently Research Associate, Harvard University"This is an excellent book. Superbly written and based on fundamentall
GREAT writing, marred by indifferent proofing Patrick J Underwood Another excellent work by this author--caused me to buy three more books on Konstantin Tsiolkovskii. I took off a star for the horrendous proofreading. You would think a publishing house called "Cambridge University Press" would make at least some effort to get it right.. "Super interesting and very well written" according to RussProf. Super interesting and very well written: I already had a copy, bought this one for a colleague in Eastern Europe who shares the interest.
The Red Rockets' Glare is the first academic study on the birth of the Soviet space program and one of the first social histories of Soviet science. Sputnik, he argues, was the outcome of both large-scale state imperatives to harness science and technology and populist phenomena that frequently owed little to the whims and needs of the state apparatus.. Based on many years of archival research, the book situates the birth of cosmic enthusiasm within the social and cultural upheavals of Russian and Soviet history. Asif A. Imagination and engineering not only fed each other but were also co-produced by key actors who maintained a delicate line between secret work on rockets (which interested the military) and public prognostications on the cosmos (which captivated the populace). Siddiqi frames the origins of Sputnik by bridging imagination with engineering - seeing them not as dialectic, discrete, and sequential but as mutable, intertwined, and concurrent
. from Carnegie Mellon University and currently lives in New York. Siddiqi is an Assistant Professor of History at Fordham University. He received his Ph.D. Asif A. His prior book, Challenge to Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945-1974 (2000), received a number of awards including a citation by the Wall Street Journal as one of the best books ever writt