MIT professor Loren Graham, the United States' foremost historian of Russian and Soviet science, doesn't publish fat tomes every decade or so as many of his peers do; he writes topical, digestible books that invite his audiences along on his scholarly travels. His last short book, The Ghost of the Executed Engineer, came out in 1993 and told the appalling story of Petr Pal'chinskii, a Russian engineer repressed and ultimately executed for his humanitarian scruples. Graham's latest book is broader in scope but still manages to weigh in at less than 200 pages. To use his own phrase, it is another "small book about big questions."

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