introduced right from the start. I remember having a lot of fun
plugging discrete solutions of PDEs into Microsoft Excel and
seeing what the solutions looked like. The chapter on Fourier
Series is good, generalized Fourier series are covered, and
you will learn concepts such as pointwise and uniform convergen-
ce. Following that, there is a chapter on boundary-value
problems which covers Dirichlet, Neumann and Sturm-Liouville
problems. For both Cartesian and curvilinear coordinates. I
can't tell you what is in the later chapters, but if the rest
of the book is like the first three chapters, then it is a great
book, well worth the money.

The book is also particularly valuable for its clarification of St. Thomas' realism in contrast to the dialectical relationship between Grace and Nature of Augustinian theologies. Fr. Chenu points out that the modern nominalist assumption that the divine can only be made manifest in irrational thought-forms is countered by St. Thomas' demonstration that the rational is a reflection of God's wisdom. Epistemological realism is thus consistent with God's desire that we should abide in a universe which is knowable through the autonomous (albeit graced) rationality of creatures.

The casual observer might think that the study of ancient cultures might be a field without much in the way of rapid change, but this would be false. The advent of powerful computer programs have recently allowed the processing of large amounts non-numerical data and graphic information. A researcher is therefore able to instantly access an entire body of text when testing an hypothesis. The authors of "Archaic Bookkeeping" made use of this powerful technique, which is becoming more useful all the time. This is made clear by the fact that as of 1993 (the date "Archaic Bookkeeping" was published), only 600 of the 5000 archaic tablets from Uruk had been sufficiently published.

I am an interested student of Sumerology, and my purchase of this book was an attempt not so much to understand archaic bookkeeping but to see examples of the actual translation process, and, to the degree that I could, follow along. There is currently very little of this sort of material available for the interested amateur. In general it seems that this information is both too difficult to have much amateur appeal, and too rudimentary for specialists in the field. For those looking for a good introduction to Sumeria, I highly recommend "The Sumerians" by Samuel Kramer.

I found the prose in this book to be very clear and well-constructed, with no trace of the fact that it had been translated from German. I found it surprisingly free of philological and linguist jargon; its main purpose was the practical communication of how the authors used the tablets to extract information about Sumerian field administration, labor organization, and animal husbandry. The book's area of focus is quite narrow, but it needs to be to cover the subject fairly. I found the tablet photographs and diagrams to be a highlight of the book and uniformly excellent. The bibliography was arranged by chapter and was very useful.