The book also describes some distinguished contemporaries, including Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak and Nikolai Bukharin.

    The radical complexity of his work--in both sound and silent forms--has given it a central place within contemporary theoretical inquiry. Vertov's writings, collected here, range from calculated manifestos setting forth his heroic vision of film's potential to dark ruminations on the inactivity forced upon him by the bureaucratization of the Soviet state.

    Technology that maimed and killed American boys in Korea and Vietnam.

    Ulam in his now-classic biography, was the consummate outsider, a man who spoke Russian with a Georgian accent all his life yet still proclaimed himself to be the supreme father of the Russian people. Often pictured as a semiliterate boor, Stalin was in fact an intellectual, and he destroyed the intellectual class to which he belonged "as thoroughly as any class in history had ever been destroyed." Ulam's account of the 20th century's Genghis Khan is an absorbing study of power won and terrifyingly applied.