Coming from humble origins, the protagonist in these memoirs was completely innocent of the fact that like all human endeavors, physics is often strongly influenced by politics. In reading the biographies of famous physicists like Einstein, one often ends up with the feeling that physicists are above petty politics. However, even great physicists get caught up in the politics that often exists in their own laboratories. An interesting memoir with a scientific edge.

Catastrophic wartime casualties and postwar discomfort with the successes of women who had served in combat roles combined to shatter prewar ideals about what service meant for Soviet masculine identity. The soldier had to be re-imagined and resold to a public that had just emerged from the Second World War, and a younger generation suspicious of state control. In doing so, Soviet military culture wrote women out and attempted to re-establish soldiering as the premier form of masculinity in society. Military Masculinity and Postwar Recovery in the Soviet Union combines textual and visual analysis, as well as archival research to highlight the multiple narratives that contributed to rebuilding military identities. Each chapter visits a particular site of this reconstruction, including debates about conscription and evasion, appropriate role models for cadets, misogynist military imagery in cartoons, the fraught militarized workplaces of nuclear physicists, and the first cohort of cosmonauts, who represented the completion of the project to rebuild militarized masculinity.

In the fantasy novel Gator Tango and the Higgs Boson, an American spy travels around the world reporting on scientific developments in other countries. In particular, he seeks information about the Higgs Boson - or the God Particle - an entity that will explain why subatomic particles have weight (a property that is not properly accounted for by current theories). His travels take him to Switzerland, Germany, France, Russia, China, Japan, Tibet, Nepal, India, Egypt and Israel, destinations enhanced by the insightful descriptions of the author, who has visited all these countries. During his missions, the spy has romantic encounters and falls in love with a KGB agent. The woman decides to leave Russia and move in with her new love in Louisiana. The dangers there not only include spy games but a giant monster alligator on the prowl. There's a lot of bite in Gator Tango. On a small island off the coast of Cape Breton, Peter Martel, a young man of French Acadian origins and a high school dropout, set out to find his place in the world. After graduating with a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Toronto, he ended up at Chalk River Laboratories doing research in pure physics

Market: Those interested in the development of 20th-century science. A modest scientific review begun by Cornell University in 1893, The Physical Review is today the most prestigious and wide-ranging collection of archival journals of American physics. To celebrate the centenary of this influential publication, Cornell professor Paul Hartman provides an informal, anecdote-rich history of the journal. This book offers readers a special opportunity to meet the scientists who initiated and nurtured the magazine and revisit landmark papers, abstracts from meetings of the American Physical Society, and articles that chronicled advances in world physics.

“An important contribution to the history of World War II . . . I have never before been able to learn so much about maintenance methods of an armored division, with precise details that underline the importance of the work, along with descriptions of how the job was done.”—Russell F. Weigley, author of Eisenhower’s Lieutenants “Cooper saw more of the war than most junior officers, and he writes about it better than almost anyone. . . . His stories are vivid, enlightening, full of life—and of pain, sorrow, horror, and triumph.”—Stephen E. Ambrose, from his Foreword “In a down-to-earth style, Death Traps tells the compelling story of one man’s assignment to the famous 3rd Armored Division that spearheaded the American advance from Normandy into Germany. Cooper served as an ordnance officer with the forward elements and was responsible for coordinating the recovery and repair of damaged American tanks. This was a dangerous job that often required him to travel alone through enemy territory, and the author recalls his service with pride, downplaying his role in the vast effort that kept the American forces well equipped and supplied. . . . [Readers] will be left with an indelible impression of the importance of the support troops and how dependent combat forces were on them.”—Library Journal “As an alumnus of the 3rd, I eagerly awaited this book’s coming out since I heard of its release . . . and the wait and the book have both been worth it. . . . Cooper is a very polished writer, and the book is very readable. But there is a certain quality of ‘you are there’ many other memoirs do not seem to have. . . . Nothing in recent times—ridgerunning in Korea, firebases in Vietnam, or even the one hundred hours of Desert Storm—pressed the ingenuity and resolve of American troops . . . like WWII. This book lays it out better than any other recent effort, and should be part of the library of any contemporary warrior.”—Stephen Sewell, Armor Magazine “Cooper’s writing and recall of harrowing events is superb and engrossing. Highly recommended.”—Robert A. Lynn, The Stars and Stripes “This detailed story will become a classic of WWII history and required reading for anyone interested in armored warfare.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) “[Death Traps] fills a critical gap in WWII literature. . . . It’s a truly unique and valuable work.”—G.I. Journal