The Iron Flood is a passionate chronicle of the heroic march in 1918 of many thousand of Red soldiers together with their families across the Caucasian mountains. Barefoot, hungry, exhausted, they rammed their way through to join the main forces of the Red Army. A lawless mob at first, they become a formidable force - the iron flood of the Revolution.Alexander Serafirmovich (1863-1949) was born on the Don. His father was paymaster in a Cossack regiment. When Alexander Serafimovich was eleven years old his family moved to the Cossack village of Ust-Medveditskaya (now the town of Serafimovich), where the boy began to go to high school. Soon after, his father died and with the death of the only bread-winner in the family life became difficult.In 1903-1907, his stories and sketches were featured in collections edited by Maxim Gorky.Serafimovich's best work, The Iron Flood, was written in 1921-23.

The Johnstown Flood is an iconic tragedy in our nation ́s history, like the Chicago Fire, the sinking of the Titanic or the San Francisco earthquake. Many books have been written about the devastating 1889 Johnstown Flood, but few about the period before or after the flood: why did the town develop in such a remote valley and why didn ́t those who livied below the dangerous dam do something about it? My book, "The Bosses Club", answers those questions, but more importantly illuminates often overlooked circumstances that contributed to the origin for the catastrophe, like the Pennsylvania Canal and Pennsylvania Railroad. How their rapid development set the stage and led to the rivaly between Cambria Iron Company and Carnegie to dominate the burgeoning Steel industry.

Introduction: Literature and the Political Problem 1. Since 1917: A Brief History Soviet Literature Persistence of the Past Fellow Travelers Proletarians The Stalinists Socialist Realism The Thaw The Sixties and Seventies 2. Mayakovsky and the Left Front of Art The Suicide Note Vladimir Mayakovsky, A Tragedy The Cloud "The Backbone Flute" The Commune and the Left Front The Bedbug and The Bath Mayakovsky as a Monument Poets of Different Camps 3. Prophets of a Brave New World The Machine and England Olesha's Critique of the Reason Envy and Rage 4. The Intellectuals, I Serapions Boris Pilnyak: Biology and History 5. The Intellectuals, II Isaac Babel: Horror in a Minor Key Konstantin Fedin: The Confrontation with Europe Leonov and Katayev Conclusion 6. The Proletarians, I The Proletcult The Blacksmith Poets Yury Libedinsky: Communists as Human Beings Tarasov-Rodionov: ,"Our Own Wives, Our Own Children" Dmitry Furmanov: An Earnest Commissar A. S. Serafimovich: A Popular Saga 7. The Proletarians, II Fyodor Gladkov: A Literary Autodidact Alexander Fadeyev: The Search for a New Leo Tolstoy Mikhail Sholokhov: The Don Cossacks A Scatter of Minor Deities Conclusion 8. The Critic Voronsky and the Pereval Group Criticism and the Study of Literature Voronsky Pereval 9. The Levers of Control under Stalin Resistance The Purge The Literary State 10. Zoshchenko and the Art of Satire 11. After Stalin: The First Two Thaws Pomerantsev, Panova, and The Guests Ilya Ehrenburg and Alexey Tolstoy The Second Thaw The Way of Pasternak 12. Into the Underground The Literary Parties The Trouble with Gosizdat End of a Thaw Buried Treasure: Platonov and Bulgakov The Exodus into Samizdat and Tamizdat Sinyavsky 13. Solzhenitsyn and the Epic of the Camps One Day The First Circle and The Cancer Ward The Gulag The Calf and the Oak: Dichtung and Wahrheit Other Contributions to the Epic 14. The Surface Channel, I: The Village 15. The Surface Channel, II: Variety of Theme and Style The City: Intelligentsia, Women, Workers The Backwoods: Ethical Problems Other New Voices of the Sixties and Seventies World War II Published Poets A Final Word on Socialist Realism 16. Exiles, Early and Late The Exile Experience "Young Prose" and What Became of It Religious Quest: Maximov and Ternovsky Truth through Obscenity: Yuz Aleshkovsky Transcendence and Tragedy: Erofeev's Trip Poetry of the Daft: Sasha Sokolov Perversion of Logic as Ideology: Alexander Zinoviev A Gathering of Writers Conclusion Notes Selected Bibliography Index

Addressing a marginalized era of Greek and Roman history, Taken at the Flood offers a compelling narrative of Rome's conquest of Greece.

From the bestselling author of the acclaimed Chaos and Genius comes a thoughtful and provocative exploration of the big ideas of the modern era: Information, communication, and information theory. Acclaimed science writer James Gleick presents an eye-opening vision of how our relationship to information has transformed the very nature of human consciousness. A fascinating intellectual journey through the history of communication and information, from the language of Africa’s talking drums to the invention of written alphabets; from the electronic transmission of code to the origins of information theory, into the new information age and the current deluge of news, tweets, images, and blogs. Along the way, Gleick profiles key innovators, including Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Samuel Morse, and Claude Shannon, and reveals how our understanding of information is transforming not only how we look at the world, but how we live. A New York Times Notable Book A Los Angeles Times and Cleveland Plain Dealer Best Book of the Year Winner of the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award