Perils of Progress: Environmental Disasters in the Twentieth Century (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780136038023)

Dr. Andrew Jenks, an associate professor of history at California State University Long Beach, is a specialist in Russian history, history of technology, and environmental history. In addition to publishing numerous articles in scholarly publications on a range of topics, he has authored a book on Russian national identity, Russia in a Box: Art and Identity in an Age of Revolution, Northern Illinois University Press, and is currently finishing a biography of the world's first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, The Cosmonaut Who Couldn't Stop Smiling: Yuri Gagarin and the Many Faces of Modern Russia, Northern Illinois University Press. Before receiving his Ph.D. in Russian history and history of technology from Stanford University in 2002, Jenks worked in the 1990s as a journalist and editor in Washington, D.C., where he covered NASA, EPA, secret military high-tech programs, and the emerging Internet business. He studied Russian language at the Pushkin Russian Language Institute in Moscow in the late 1980s, where he also worked as a translator in the Moscow CNN office. He also worked for six months on Soviet fishing boats in the Bering Sea.