Making Waves : Stories from My Life

Yakov Alpert (b. 1911) has been making waves all his life -- in scientific laboratories, where his pioneering work as a radio physicist earned him world renown, and in the Soviet Union, where he defied the repressive Soviet regime, became a refusnik and a dissident, and at the age of 76 finally won permission to emigrate to the United States. Alpert tells in this gripping personal memoir what it was like to be a scientist during the entire life cycle of the Soviet Union. His account provides a uniquely revealing look inside the Soviet scientific community, a firsthand view of Soviet society from postrevolutionary days to the nation's ultimate collapse, and a thought-provoking description of how scientists and citizens responded, some bravely and some cravenly, to the repression and anti-Semitism of the Soviet regime.

Yakov Alpert is now senior scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.