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"Spufford cunningly maps out a literary genre of his own . . . Freewheeling and fabulous." —The Times (London) Strange as it may seem, the gray, oppressive USSR was founded on a fairy tale. It was built on the twentieth-century magic called "the planned economy," which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things that the lands of capitalism could never match. And just for a little while, in the heady years of the late 1950s, the magic seemed to be working. Red Plenty is about that moment in history, and how it came, and how it went away; about the brief era when, under the rash leadership of Khrushchev, the Soviet Union looked forward to a future of rich communists and envious capitalists, when Moscow would out-glitter Manhattan and every Lada would be better engineered than a Porsche. It's about the scientists who did their genuinely brilliant best to make the dream come true, to give the tyranny its happy ending. Red Plenty is history, it's fiction, it's as ambitious as Sputnik, as uncompromising as an Aeroflot flight attendant, and as different from what you were expecting as a glass of Soviet champagne.
How, despite thirty years of effort, Soviet attempts to build a national computer network were undone by socialists who seemed to behave like capitalists. Between 1959 and 1989, Soviet scientists and officials made numerous attempts to network their nation—to construct a nationwide computer network. None of these attempts succeeded, and the enterprise had been abandoned by the time the Soviet Union fell apart. Meanwhile, ARPANET, the American precursor to the Internet, went online in 1969. Why did the Soviet network, with top-level scientists and patriotic incentives, fail while the American network succeeded? In How Not to Network a Nation, Benjamin Peters reverses the usual cold war dualities and argues that the American ARPANET took shape thanks to well-managed state subsidies and collaborative research environments and the Soviet network projects stumbled because of unregulated competition among self-interested institutions, bureaucrats, and others. The capitalists behaved like socialists while the socialists behaved like capitalists. After examining the midcentury rise of cybernetics, the science of self-governing systems, and the emergence in the Soviet Union of economic cybernetics, Peters complicates this uneasy role reversal while chronicling the various Soviet attempts to build a “unified information network.” Drawing on previously unknown archival and historical materials, he focuses on the final, and most ambitious of these projects, the All-State Automated System of Management (OGAS), and its principal promoter, Viktor M. Glushkov. Peters describes the rise and fall of OGAS—its theoretical and practical reach, its vision of a national economy managed by network, the bureaucratic obstacles it encountered, and the institutional stalemate that killed it. Finally, he considers the implications of the Soviet experience for today's networked world.
Offers a survey of commercial products created in Russia during the 1960s and 1970s through photographs and essays that describe the inspiration, design, and consumer success of each product.
Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing to give its proper name, has become part of our lives recently, due to the massive exploitation of America’s shale oil and gas fields. Along the way it has stirred up controversy, with passionate opponents fighting against the oil companies. The fight has generated a lot of heat, but not much understanding. This guide, written by some-one who knows what he is talking about takes a detached, neutral view of the subject. Without pushing a view for or against, it provides the factual background you need to form an opinion of your own. An Informed and Neutral Introduction Like most people I have heard of fracking, but did I really understand what it was? To answer honestly, no. I knew it had something to do with mining and was perhaps destructive to the land. To me, it was just one of those words of the moment. This guide has given me a real sense and understanding of what fracking is. It allowed me, someone who has no experience in this field, to learn about the pros and cons of fracking, without having the good and bad of it forced down my throat. If you want an informed and neutral introduction into fracking, then this is the guide for you. ~ Debbie Prewer
The Real Thirteen Days: The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962. National Security Archive Documents Reader by Laurence Chang and Peter Kornbluh. National Security Archive Microfiche Collection Declassified intelligence reports, national security memoranda, cables, letters and summaries on everything from Operation MONGOOSE - America's covert war on the Castro government - through the resolution of the crisis, including translations of the letters exchanged between Khruschev, Kennedy.