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| from Kombinat: Industrial Ruins of the Golden Era, courtesy igloo heritage |
When I went to Romania shortly before the downfall of the Ceauşescu regime, the Romanians (to judge by the displays in the bookshops) seemed to be a nation of stereochemists: for displayed to the exclusion of almost everything else in the bookshop windows was a volume entitled The Stereospecific Characterization of Isoprene. Perhaps the authorship, or the alleged authorship, of this volume explained its strange popularity: that of Elena Ceauşescu, Doctor of Science and Member of the Romanian Academy.
I di ...
This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 27 June 2009, on page 85
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http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Always-in-the-wrong-place-4112