Par le trou de la serrure

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Dominic Phelan

<p><i>Cold War Space Sleuths</i> reads like a Cold War espionage novel, but the reality of the story about the dedicated amateur observers bent on finding out about Soviet spaceflight during the Cold War is just as exciting and absorbing. Told in the sleuth's own words, each chapter unfolds a piece of the hidden history of what was happening behind the Iron Curtain.</p><p>Coming from all over the world, including Russia itself, the amateur spies give first-hand accounts of often-forgotten aspects of the Cold War space race. Amongst others, their stories include:</p><p>- the history of the Kettering Group;<br>- looking inside the Russian archives;<br>- unsolved mysteries, such as why cosmonauts were airbrushed out of the official archives;<br>- reading between the lines of the Soviet media;<br>- the impact of Gorbachev's g<i>lasnost</i> on sleuthing;<br>- new research, including chapters by James Oberg, Asif Siddiqi, and Bart Hendrickx.</p>

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Alan A. Block

Most research on organized crime reveals only a limited sense of its history. Our understanding suffers as a result. Space, Time, and Organized Crime shows how arguments about the sources, consequences, and extent of crime are distorted as a consequence of crude empiricism. Originally published in Europe in 1991 as Perspectives on Organizing Crime, this book is a timely blend of history, criticism, and research. Fully one-fourth of this new edition contains hitherto unpublished materials especially relevant to the American experience. Space, Time, and Organized Crime describes the background of Progressive Era New York. It then broadens its scope by exploring the changes in drug production and distribution in Europe from about 1925 to the mid-1930s. Block addresses such little explored issues as the ethnicity of traders, the structure of drug syndicates, and the impact of legislation that attempted to criminalize increasing aspects of the world's narcotic industry prior to the Second World War. He then goes on to present organized crime's involvement with transnational political movements, intelligence services, and political murders. Space, Time, and Organized Crime concentrates on ambiguities evident in organized crime control, such as the U.S. Internal Revenue Service's protection of criminal off-shore financial interests, and the contradictions found in America's wars on drugs. . Space, Time, and Organized Crime demonstrates that the essential nature of crime in the twentieth century (regardless of where it takes place) cannot be understood without sound historical studies and a more sophisticated criminological approach. Block's unique blend of stratification in a historical context will be of special interest to historians, sociologists, criminologists, and penologists.

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Samah Selim

"This book places the field of modern Arabic literature studies in the context of contemporary debates in the humanities about the relationship between narrative, history and ideology. In this sense, it addresses pressing issues raised by literary theory, literary history and postcolonial studies, and grounds these broader discussions in a study of a particular narrative genre - the novel - as it has been constructed and produced over a century in a local/global context. The book locates questions of languages, genre, textuality and canonicity within a historical and theoretical framework that foregrounds the emergence of modern nationalism in Egypt. The ways in which the cultural discourses produced by twentieth-century Egyptian nationalism created a space for both a hegemonic and counter-hegemonic politics of language, class and place that inscribed bifurcated narrative and social geography are examined. The book argues that the rupture between the village and the city contained in the Egyptian nationalism discourse is reproduced as a narrative dislocation that has continued to characterize and shape the Egyptian novel in general and the village novel in particular. Reading the village novel in Egypt as a dynamic intertext that constructs modernity in a local historical and political context, rather than rehearsing a simple repetition of dominant European literary-critical paradigms, this book offers a new approach to the construction of modern Arabic literary history, as well as to theoretical questions related to the structure and role of the novel as a worldly narrative genre."--BOOK JACKET.

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Michael Lennick

Space junkies and armchair astronauts are provided with comprehensive, handy references for a variety of space-related missions, vehicles, and concepts in this pocket-sized series. Compiled with the cooperation of NASA, each topic-specific reference features relevant statistics, photographs, and the stories behind each project. Books on manned missions include crew photographs, information on patches and equipment, and flight statistics such as time in space, distance traveled, and mission objectives. Photographs and statistics for launch vehicles, orbiters, probes, and experimental equipment are featured in each equipment-specific reference. Covering such design elements as propellants, tanks, engines, and payloads, this detailed look at the mechanism that gets it all started describes 259 types of launch vehicles developed by China, the European Space Agency, Japan, Russia, and the United States. A total of 259 types of launch vehicles have been launched into space by the United States (165), Russia (54), China (14), Japan (14) and the European Space Agency (ESA) (12). Propellants, Tanks, Engines, and Payloads are just a few of the elements that are listed for each of these Launch Vehicle. Learn how these most complex and awe inspiring machines actually work and why they call anything that is difficult to achieve "Rocket Science".