Zhores Alferov was a Soviet physicist whose career ran almost exactly alongside Stalinist pressure, Cold War competition, state planning, technological prestige, perestroika, institutional collapse, and then the afterlife of Soviet scientific authority in post-Soviet Russia.

This biography follows Alferov from childhood and early scientific formation through his work in semiconductor physics, especially heterostructures, which eventually earned him a share of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics. But the more interesting thing here is not just “clever man does clever science,” thank God, because that would be bleakly medicinal (pardon the pun).

Josephson uses Alferov’s life as a way into the broader world of Soviet research culture: laboratories as political spaces, scientific ambition under state ideology, the relationship between funding and loyalty, and the double-bind of being both protected and trapped by a system that treated science as national destiny. 

Hardback, MIT Press, 2010, with dust jacket; later printing rather than true first. Good second-hand condition with light shelf wear to jacket and boards, and clean internal pages.