Thanks, it was a hard book, but very thorough and informative

From a book review of Five Billion Vodka Bottles to the Moon: Tales of a Soviet Scientist by Iosif Shklovsky in the January/February edition of The Sciences.

November 1941. As the German armies advance on Moscow, a rising stream of noncombatants flees the city. In a freight car headed south a group of university students huddles around a creaking wood stove. They are ragged and infested with lice, and most will not live through the war. But for now they are joking and swapping stories as if time would go on forever.

A thin boy, shy and aloof, asks Iosif Shklovsky, the senior student in the group, for something to read. In the arrogance of youth, Shklovsky obliges with a dense mathematical text on quantum theory. It would be no loss, he thinks, if the book were never returned, for he has never been able to penetrate beyond the first paragraph. But when the train reaches its destination several days later, the boy hands the book back to Shklovsky. "Thanks," he says. "It was a hard book, but very thorough and informative.>

The youngest student was Andrei Sakharov, who would go on to become one of the preeminent physicists of the postwar U.S.S.R. Shklovsky himself was also destined for the highest echelons of Soviet science, in astronomy. On Sakharov's 50th birthday, 30 years after their train trip together, Sakharov presented the same book to him with a smile. The humor, so typical of these memoirs, was a bit ironic, a bit sentimental and a bit at Shklovsky's own expense.