Our Evolving Universe is definitely a cut above the average work on cosmology and astronomy. The author, Malcolm Longair, is both an accomplished scientist and a noted lecturer on astronomy for young peoples' programs, which makes his book an ideal volume for those with a non-professional interest in this topic.

The photos are colorful and reveal the impressive advances that observational astronomy has made since the introduction of newer technology. This is made most apparent in the comparison of images of stars in the cluster 30 Doradus as observed from a ground observatory and from the Hubble telescope before and after the lens correction. My favorites are the color enhanced map images taken by means of xray, gamma ray, and infrared wavebands.

Although some of the material will be more accessible to those with a solid background in physics--the author explains in slightly more detail, for instance, wave-particle and stellar/solar physics than most beginning texts--the development of the theme of the book will still be understandable to the average reader with an interest in astronomy and cosmology. A good handle on interpretation of graphic data is a must, though, since the volume includes a number of graphic illustrations of concepts which will help the reader understand on an intuitive level the meaning of the formulae that the author includes. My own comprehension of physics is quite average, and I found the book understandable. This might in fact be a good way to introduce high school physics students to the practical application of the principles learned in their texts.

For those readers who feel intimidated by the introduction of formulae or for the interested individual of junior high level, the books Nightwatch A Practical Guide to Viewing the Universe or the Universe and Beyond, both by Terence Dickinson, might be a better place to start ones reading before embarking on the Longair book.

Obviously there's no point claiming that the evolution of the universe can be made simple- it wasn't, and it can't. However, Professor Longair, in this book, focusses on ideas rather than details and manages to strike what I think is a good balance between straightforward explanation and including enough detail to make the book a worthwhile exercise. A good example are the many graphs and charts that the book contain. As a maths teacher I had to work hard to understand what they were saying and how they related to the text, but I always felt it was worthwhile to do so. A picture (or a graph!) definitely paints a thousand words, even when the words are long and technical.

The book tells the story of the universe by explaining and discussing significant epochs and periods in the universe's early history, and their significance today. It explains the recently-discovered cosmic background radiation, the question of the ultimate fate of the universe and other fundamental and currently-undecided questions. You will quickly become used to considering the first second, micro-second, nano-second and pico-second of the universe and I can guarantee your head will throb after a while.

This is, in my view, a stunning book mainly due to the subject matter... though it would have been easy to obscure its nature. The pictures are wonderful and it is a "page-turner" for those who marvel at the cosmos. Read it, love it and then read Alan Guth's book on Inflation (I can't remember the title but I'm sure you can find it!)

I have to admit that just as I was starting to savour this thin slip of a book I found that it was, indeed, mere selections. The whole narrative is actually three volumes, over four hundred pages a volume. I was left with a craven empty feeling like a fiend for his needle. Humboldt's writing presages Thoreau and through him ponders the transcendent raptures of the natural world. Reading through the visit to the Caribs reminded me of my visits to the Grenadines where their presence is still redolent in the shadows under the almond trees. I felt that I had imbibed the same air as Humboldt.

Alexander von Humboldt (of the Current fame) was a famous polymath during the age of enlightenment. Like many noblemen, he used his money and leisure time in esoteric pursuits, such as collecting flora & fauna and trying to find the deeper meaning of it all.

This particular volume has been well-translated from the original - there is none of that stilted 'I haf von the Cherman translated been' style - it reads conversationally (assisted by the editing-out of long passages where Humboldt takes one of his many diversions) yet it also gives us an idea of what the man was really like. There is an extensive set of notes at the back, not just references, but elaboration of the point, which I found very illuminating.

His travels to South America span 5 years, during which time he collects and measures EVERYTHING - for at this time in history, no-one knew what was going to be pertinent or useful to science or economy. There are some amazing descriptions where he was the first educated person to see places; the problems of travel in uncharted, trackless & mountainous country make terrific reading. We may scoff at the zeal of the man, but if Hiram Bingham hadn't done the same, we wouldn't have the fantastic ruins of Macchu Picchu to study.

We also learn of the relatively tight circle of 'scientists' at that time - almost everyone knew everyone else, either via letters, Society writings or personal contact - and they knew it all; there was as yet no division between geology, biology, zoology etc - it was just 'Natural Philosophy' and one studied the lot (of course some dedicated themselves to a favourite pursuit). What is amazing to us now is the most simple things were unknown; for example, a sailor at death's door deep in the bowels of the ship, 'miraculously' recovers when taken on deck, out of the fetid miasma of the orlop - well, who wouldn't?... There are many similar incidents.

Slightly heavy going at times, because of the writing style of the period, it is nevertheless chock full of interesting snippets and amazing discoveries, giving a great insight into the mind and motives of a typical adventurous philosopher of the time. *****

This text, which I used in each of my three calculus-based introductory lecture classes, is a very solid text. The subjects covered are very thorough. However, there have been some complaints as to incorrect answers to some odd-numbered questions both in the back of the book and in the solutions manuals.

I love this book. It's a treasure on my bookshelf -- maybe the best "general" physics book I have read so far. The explanations are clear, complete, and elegant. The authors are more than helpful as teachers for those who think that understanding is more important than problem-solving. They are not interested in short-cut procedures to make you pretend smart. Instead, they care about you and tried to make you a scientific thinker. If you got this book, I would say, "congratuations!!" The best way to read this book is having a rough idea about real analysis, not only basic calculus. The book is not only good for physical concepts, but also for a solid background in mathematics. It's good textbook and reference. Today's introductory physics books tend to be like instant-noodle -- trainings for exams. This one is not. The publisher should not stop printing this one for the sake of advancing scientific study. Or maybe it would become a Dover.

The book by Lines and Glass is the most comprehensive book on the physics of ferroelectrics that I have come across in the pertinent literature. It is by no means for the novice since a solid background in solid state physics is absoluytely needed. The book especially addresses the lattice dynamics picture of ferroelectricity in a concise manner. Also, optical properties of ferroelectrics are given in full depth that is rather difficult to find in many other texts. This book is by no means a textbook. It is very comprehensive reference volume as it contains a lot of critical experimental data and quite a lot of illustrations. Furthermore, the bibliography is vast. All physical models used in the physics of ferroelectricity are derived/summarized from the very first step making the book very "dense" in content. It would characterize the book as somewhat difficult to read, yet I highly recommend it for those who are interested in the physics of ferroelectric phenomena. I do hope that book will be reprinted soon and be available at an affordable price. Addendum: Since the writing of this review, it seems the book has become available again at a much reduced price ;-)

this is by far the most detail book on ferroelectric theory and application

This was my FIRST novel, and I don't regret it. Jahanna N. Malcom writes this book with pure genius. I remember it as scary, fun and gross. There are 3 siblings in the Bullock family who are the worst behaved kids ever! So, when on their vacation, the kids recieve a babysitter from hell who even after death, won't leave them alone. I was terrified and laughing at the same time. I'd recommend this book to anyone. It was pretty freaky and has a twist ending!

When i saw this book, it really didnt catch my eye as any other book would.As i started to read the first PAGE i knew this book was going to be good.It's about three terrible kids who get stuck with the meanest baby-sitter on this planet.They play dirty tricks on her but they don't know what there in for.In an "accident" the kids kill their baby-sitter but it wont matter in the end because Ariadne gets her revenge and the kids get what they deserve.

Malcolm Walter has written a fascinating guide to where we should look for current or past life on Mars. As a non-scientist I was not quite sure what to expect in buying this book, but what I found was a thoughtful discussion of how one scientist would explore the red planet for signs of life. Walter gives a short, understandable review of the scientific discoveries to date from the past NASA missions as a prelude to what to expect in the future. However, his background is in palaeobiology on Earth, which I learned is the study of fossilied life. Having absolutely no knowledge of this field myself, I sometimes felt a little lost in his technical discussions and wasn't always sure that I wanted to know as much as he told me about microbe fossils on Earth. Nevertheless, the thrust of his arguments and points he made were all clear. The heart of his case is that there is a lot we can learn from palaeobiology on Earth that should inform how we search for life, which may very well only be fossilized former life, on Mars. The importance future extensive scientific exploration for signs of past or present life on Mars is also well made. Overall, this short book (170 pages including the index) is worth the the time, and for a layman the effort, for anyone who has even a passing interest in this subject.

This book is a little like "Here be Dragons," (Koerner, LeVay, Oxford University Press, 2000) and "Rare Earth," (Ward, Brownlee, Copernicus, 2000) except that it is more focused and specific than the others. While Koerner, LeVay, Ward, and Brownlee consider the possibility that life exists outside the solar system, Walter limits the scope of his book to the question of whether microbes exist, or once existed, on Mars.

Life outside of earth has never been unambiguously observed and verified. Consequently, discussions about the possibility of life beyond earth inevitably begin with thoughts about how life originated here. There seems to be an emerging sense that life is the result of a universe that is naturally self-organizing (Stuart Kauffman is in this camp. See his book "At Home in the Universe, Oxford University Press, 1995). According to this point of view, life is all but certain to arise on any planet having the basic chemicals and physical conditions found on earth 4 billion years ago. Given this hypothesis - that life arises quickly and naturally in the proper environment - it's natural to ask if any other planets in the solar system have (or had) the necessary ingredients. If they did, we should look to see if life evolved there. Since there is growing evidence that Mars had a distant past with some of these conditions, it seems more and more important that we look for life on Mars. Finding evidence of life there would buttress the concept that life readily evolves given the proper environment. Obviously, if that's the case, it holds enormous consequences for modern science.

Walter has a nice chapter on the tree of life, and describes recent information showing that "all the lowest branches of the tree are occupied by hyperthermophiles." The discovery that life exists on earth under extreme conditions (like those of deep-sea thermal vents) has increased the hope among scientists that it might also have evolved and flourished on Mars many thousands of millions of years ago. He also shows how genetic transfer between species happens today, and was probably common among our earliest ancestors, so that the whole concept of a "tree of life" becomes somewhat tangled during the earliest stages of the evolution of life. Instead of a tree, the topology looks more like a web, with the roots of the tree (consisting of Bacteria, Eucarya, and Archaea) rising out of this web.

The expectation of finding evidence of life on Mars depends on the type of environment that Mars supported in the distant past, and the circumstances under which life arose on earth. It also depends on how easy it is to ascertain the evidence of fossilized ancient microbial life. It turns out that identifying evidence of microbes in very old rocks is a pretty hard thing to do. To illustrate this, Walter describes the difficulty of identifying stromatolites in ancient rocks. This was new information for me, and a real insight into the nuts and bolts of making these sorts of identifications. I'd thought that stromatolites were easy to identify, but in the very oldest rocks, they're not. When identifying stromatolites in rocks 3000 million years old, there can be (and often is) a great deal of controversy regarding the conclusion. Walter's point in making this so clear is that stromatolites are large colonies of microbes, yet even they are not unambiguously identified in the oldest rocks. The problem of identifying evidence for individual microbes in rocks 3000 to 3500 million years old is even tougher. The point being that even with Martian rocks in our hands, it's not going to be easy to affirmatively state whether there is evidence of ancient life on Mars.

To drill the point home, Walter points to the fact that we do have chunks of Martian rocks on hand, in the form of bits and pieces that have been blasted off the Martian surface by meteorite impacts. Walter describes in detail the scientific examination of some of these rocks, and one, in particular, identified as ALH84001. This meteorite made world news when a team of scientists reported finding evidence of ancient microbes buried inside it. Walter describes the initial reports, the objections, and the eventual state of limbo in which these conclusions came to rest. This helps set the tone for expectations regarding the difficulty against which such analysis will proceed even when we manage to return samples from the Martian surface using spacecraft.

In describing how scientists make conclusion about the presence of microbes in ancient rocks, Walter does a real service by illustrating the importance of convergent evidence. Identifying ancient microbes involves more than one type of observation. It involves many types of converging data, including visible observations of deposits in rocks, the types of rocks involved, and things like carbon isotope ratios (not to be confused with carbon 14, which decays far to quickly for analysis in 3000-million-year-old rocks). Along these lines, I noticed a recent article in Photonics Spectra (May 2001) describing the use of Raman imaging to identify microfossils - another tool, in the search for the ancient life on earth, and possibly on Mars.

The book ends with some very informative discussions about proposals for future landing sites on Mars, for sample analysis and/or return.

This is a very informative book, with useful insights into the way science works, complete with several pages of color plates, a useable index, and short list of further reading material. If you are interested in what NASA does, and how the scientific search for life on Mars is (and will be) carried out, I think you will like it. I certainly did.

This is not a review as such but if you are interested in this book and can't find a copy you may be interested to know that the authors ARE working on a second edition.

This books examines why Adventism happened and its context in American history. It gives sound reasons and lays open the truth about a group which it can be hard to get information on. The way in which they examine Ellen White as a prophet is particularly useful.

This book was allright but not as good as the other Treasured Horses book release at the same time, Ride of Courage. Spirit of the West is about Jessie, a Nez Perce Indian girl whose pride and determination to show off to her new friends causes a valuable foal on the Oregon ranch her father works on to wander off, and now Jessie must search for the foal.

This is one of my all time favorite books about horses by one of my favorite authors.

Despite the reverence with which Bradbury is regarded and the fact that this was his last book, it will probably never receive a literary award. Parts of it are insightfully descriptive, thoughtful, humorous, and fun to read, but it lacks the unity (and editing!) which would make it a coherent whole, feeling more like a draft than a finished product.

Two story lines unfold on parallel tracks. Denis Diderot is at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, visiting the court of Catherine the Great and discussing philosophy with her every afternoon in the hope that she will become an enlightened leader, rather than an autocratic despot. The second, less effective story involves seven contemporary characters--a writer, a diplomat, a carpenter, an opera singer, a trade unionist, a dramatist, and a "funky professor" with "I Love Deconstruction" on his hat. This motley group, representing some of the areas in which Diderot was interested, is participating in the Diderot Project, the object of which is to find all the books and papers which once belonged to Diderot and which he sold to Catherine for his "pension and posterity." All participants regard this as a junket--a free trip.

The atmosphere of 18th century Russia and of the Age of Enlightenment is vivid, and it is easy for the reader to feel the philosophical give and take of the discussions between Diderot and Catherine. The lengthy discussions, with references to Voltaire, Rousseau, Lawrence Sterne, David Garrick, and Dr. Johnson, among others, are intriguing for the connections they make, and they are often humorous, but they are too long and heavy here, and they weigh down and eventually bury the slim plot.

As for the Diderot Project participants, they are sketchy characters, and one never really gets to understand them. And why someone would fund this supposed project when its goals seem so amorphous and the objectives in Russia so nebulous remains a permanent (and unrealistic) mystery. The fact that the group arrives just as Yeltsin dismisses the Duma and a possible coup or revolution is taking place could have been used to show some nice parallels and contrasts with the rule of Catherine and the ideas of Diderot, but the author's selection of details which would make this clear to the reader just didn't happen.

The character of Galina, a discussion of postmortemism (the idea that writers all borrow directly from previous generations, thereby living forever), and the meeting of Diderot and Thomas Jefferson (and suggestion that Diderot thereby contributed to the U.S. Constitution) are among the many wonderful features of this book, but they are hidden away in this 500-page attic of a book.

"To The Hermitage", by Malcolm Bradbury is the only work of his that I have read. I can say that I very much enjoyed the work, and was saddened to learn this was his last before his death. From The Preface when he states, "this is (I suppose) a story", and then he lists all the amendments he made to centuries of history from Architectural, Literary, the births of persons, and the layout of cities, he clearly seemed to be intent on having fun.

The main character sets out with a very diverse group to St. Petersburg as part of the collective named, "The Diderot Project". Ostensibly this is a scholarly event where the appropriate papers shall be shared on their voyage, and the rigorous standards of Academe will reign. Our Protagonist is unprepared with his paper and substitutes an off the cuff speech that if performed in real life would be nothing short of mesmerizing. Even written on the page it reads as though spontaneous in spite of the medium it is presented upon.

The intent of the trip is suspect almost from the start as one member of the entourage is a famous singer of opera and is almost as famously as ignorant of Mr. Diderot. Her lone claim is an influence she shares that Diderot had on pieces of Mozart's work. The balance of the group has a variety of academic credentials, however as the male members begin chasing, "Tatianas", all over the ship, the façade is dented if not torn altogether. This free and easy mingling takes place as the USSR is gaining the word former in front of it.

To the rescue is a parallel story featuring the dialogues/friendship of Diderot and Catherine The Great. Now again the reader is warned that historical figures that never met, do meet in this book because the Author feels they should have. So any dates you may know must be made flexible or forgotten. The Protagonists experiences and that of this historical version of Diderot and his travels trade the reader's attention back and forth throughout the book.

This work is a great deal of fun for the knowledge to document History is immense. To credibly alter History, add amusement, and restructure those portions as the writer chooses, is I believe, an even greater work of scholarship. For Mr. Bradbury did not write of History in the format as a novel because he lacked the truth, he did so because his knowledge allowed him to manipulate events to make his version entertaining, and in its own way credible. This really is a great piece of writing. I cannot compare it to other work this man has written, but if they are as good as this, I shall read them all.