Asimov wrote Black Widower short stories for _Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine_ for years, rounding out each batch to a dozen with a few previously unpublished episodes for each new Widower collection. The Widowers are a stag club who meet once a month at the Milano restaurant: Avalon (patent attorney), Drake (research chemist), Gonzalo (painter), Halsted (teacher), Rubin (author), and Trumbull (intelligence analyst). They rotate the office of host; each month's host brings a guest for an evening of dinner, conversation, and grilling, and each eventually produces a problem of some kind for the Widowers to try to solve. (Problem-solving isn't the point of the club; Avalon, for one, grumbles about how the grilling always seems to degenerate into sleuthing, lately.) The seventh Widower - Henry, the waiter - always produces the solution after the other six have batted the problem around awhile.

I can see why EQMM usually ate them up; the puzzles tend to be the kind of artificial gimmick that EQ's own early adventures were noted for - fair, if you know the right bits of trivia, and can view the problem as a constructed puzzle rather than a story about people. The crossword aroma is generally diluted with a healthy dose of Black Widower squabbling, though, as well as the wildcard element of the guests, so they're an entertaining read.

"When No Man Pursueth" Guest: Mortimer Stellar (a stand-in for Asimov himself), who's annoyed with a publisher who bought an article only to sit on it without explanation. [Asimov used this story to blow off steam about a real-life incident.]

"Quicker Than the Eye" - Host: Trumbull. Guest: Robert Alford Bunsen, Trumbull's boss - because Trumbull couldn't explain previous successes without violating Widower confidentiality. Bunsen's minions baited a trap with a small item, in hopes of tracing their opponents' network when it was passed in a restaurant, but they still don't know how it was done. (Henry points out the obvious problem - the agent's people *must* know, after various searches and X-rays, that his cover was blown - but Bunsen's response is adequate. My issue with Trumbull's occasional panics over the dangers of unbroken enemy codes is that either the problems are very dated or Asimov didn't concern himself with making Trumbull a realistic cryptography expert, but I can always read _The Devil's Code_ for that kind of thing.)

"A Chip of the Black Stone" (a.k.a. "The Iron Gem"), according to a family legend of the Widowers' guest, Latimer Reed, is supposedly a stolen fragment of the Kaaba, but the legend's dubious, at best. On the other hand, someone years ago was *desperate* to buy it...

"The Three Numbers" (a.k.a. "All in the Way You Read It") - Host: Drake. Guest: Samuel Puntsch, a fellow researcher, although in physics rather than chemistry. A family friend and co-worker, recently committed to a mental hospital, may have an important breakthrough locked in his safe. Why won't the combination work?

"Nothing Like Murder" The Widowers' guest, a Soviet paying his first visit to New York, believes his fears of street crime were justified: he says he overheard murder being plotted in a public park. What was really said?

"Confessions of an American Cigarette Smoker" (a.k.a. "No Smoking") One of a personnel manager's little psychological tests was to observe job candidates' reactions to a pack of cigarettes: if they refused, the manner of the refusal; if they accepted, their body language and subsequent behaviour. At least one candidate, however, appears to have turned the tables to manipulate the examiner, tricking the personnel guy into a badly mistaken hiring decision. [The trick here is to figure out how the examinee betrayed signs of his deviousness during the interview that the examiner failed to pick up on.]

"Season's Greetings!" The guest is one of the Widowers' occasional quirky collectors: they've had puzzles concerning guys who collected postcards, games, even matchbooks. This month's guest collects unusual Christmas cards - why did someone mock him recently by sending an anonymous, cheapo card?

"The One and Only East" - Host: Gonzalo. Guest: Ralph Murdock, Elder of the Disciples of Holiness and cousin of Gonzalo's landlady. He's a decent man, although sober in several senses: dress, manner, and drink. His late uncle was none of those things, and destroyed his health through his appetites. However, he was determined to have the last laugh: if Murdock can't deduce which of the six cities on his uncle's list matches his only cryptic clue, he'll have to gamble - guess randomly - if he wants the inheritance.

"Earthset and Evening Star" Guest: Jean Servais, whose partner inexplicably refuses to see reason about the setting of a lunar colony they're designing for a movie. [The puzzle resembles that of the Wendell Urth mystery "The Key" (_The Best Mysteries of Isaac Asimov_).]

A letter dated only "Friday the Thirteenth" may be a clue in posthumously proving the innocence of a man executed long ago for an assassination attempt on President Coolidge. [Asimov had weaknesses for both presidential and calendar puzzles; both pop up regularly in his mysteries.]

"The Unabridged" is the only clue the Widowers' guest, Jason Leominster, has to the location of a valuable stamp hidden in his late aunt's house; he must locate it before auctioning her effects.

"The Ultimate Crime" Guest: Ronald Mason. In the author's note, Asimov confesses that *he* was the writer (in this story, Mason) who felt obliged to contribute to Sherlockian scholarship to consider himself a true Baker Street Irregular, and the theory propounded herein is his own; Asimov just couldn't bear not to let the world know how clever he'd been. :) The problem herein is that of Professor Moriarty's academic career: what was his great work, _The Dynamics of an Asteroid_, really about? [I think Asimov came up with a cool theory.]

This is the sixth book in the humorous Norby science fiction series for children about a space cadet and his unusual robot named Norby. A criminal from Earth has escaped into hyperspace and exploded a bomb that opens a "door" to another universe. Jeff and Norby, with their friends, have to travel through hyperspace and time to change history back to its original path. Malevolent beings from the other universe have entered through the door and take over our universe. Jeff and Norby strive to change history so this doesn't occur.

This is another volume in Isaac Asimov's series on the universe, primarily directed toward elementary school children. This book presents beautiful pictures and discussions of galaxies and galaxy groups. There is a 1995 updating of this 1988 book: It is titled "Our Vast Home: The Milky Way and Other Galaxies" Children interested in the stars will love it.

This novel is very entertaining, although it does have problems. Featuring the introduction of Steve, Jane, Hunter, The MC Governor Robot, and Wayne Nystrom, it starts a series about a chase through time involving six small robots, their obsessive and selfish creator, and a group of people attempting to keep the robots from detonating in nuclear-warhead like fashion.

The creator is a jerk, and he is an easily hatable villain, which is nice. However, some of the other characters are a bit thin. Chad, for example, was a paleontologist who butts heads with Steve for most of the book. This is a poor method of character development in a novel this short, and more thought needs to be given to it being a character development on the part of Steve throughout the series. He, Jane, and Wayne have that time, but Chad should have been a bit less antagonistic.

Another problem is that there are pacing issues. Sometimes the action moves along nicely and everything makes sense. Other times, the story seems disjointed and the characters seem to have some knowledge that they shouldn't, merely to keep it going.

It is an entertaining book with a modicum of good scientific data in it. Well worth reading, and worth purchasing, although it is geared more toward a younger audience, I think.
Harkius

I have always liked Asimov's style of writing. His books, no matter how complex the subject are always very readable and this is no exception. Since I have studied weights and measures for a long time, I was looking for more depth and more obscure units than I found here, but the book does not pretend to be a work on ancient and obscure, so I can't fault it for that. If you are looking for a good basic understanding of measurement systems and units with some interesting historical sidelights thrown in, this book will do the trick.

When I picked up this book I thought that Isaac Asimov was a scifi guy, not historian. By the time I was finished reading the book though, my thinking had changed.

Information is presented in just the right amount of detail. It doesn't read like a textbook, but it scope is broad, and yet he was able to zoom in on certain interesting points of minutia.

All in all, for general information, this book is tops.

This collection is a little more uneven than the Ray Bradbury collection ("Fantastic Tales of Ray Bradbury"), because the stories (and opening poem) vary more in quality. There are also 1950s SF tropes that haven't dated well, such as a preoccupation with gigantic (planet-sized or larger) computers, and recurrent mention of the antagonists of World War II. There are no great surprises or changes in story interpretation (as I got from Bradbury's reading of "John Huff's Leavetaking"). Finally, Asimov's after-comments occasionally come too close to the end of the story or make it seem trite by "explaining" the story or drawing attention to side details (such as the "prediction" of hand-held calculators in "The Feeling of Power").

Given all this, why do I still think this is an outstanding collection? Because Asimov has such a warm and ingratiating reading style. You feel as if you are in the room with a good friend who wants to tell you some good stories. Asimov isn't a great voice actor, but he obviously regards these stories with genuine affection, and isn't afraid to cry at the end of "The Ugly Little Boy." (His after-remark notes that he has gotten letters from people who said the story made them cry, and he says that's perfectly all right, since he cried when writing it and cried again just now when reading it.) The affection for the stories feels like an affection for the reader as well, making this a very charming collection of stories by a late Grandmaster of Science Fiction.

CONTENTS: Introduction; I Just Make Them Up, See; Someday; The Feeling of Power; Living Space; Satisfaction Guaranteed; The Last Question; Jokester; The Immortal Bard; Spell My Name With an "S"; The Ugly Little Boy

This book, which covers SF of the decade of the 1940's, is actually one volume of a series of books on "classic" sci-fi.

The short novels in this book are fair; the volume contains some of the more popular tales (seen in SF anthologies everywhere), and some stories that don't get printed as often.

Interesting note: The Introduction (penned by Isaac Asimov) refers to the work (sci-fi) of the 1940's as "The Age of John W. Campbell", whose work is notably absent from the volume.

The short novels are:

"Time Wants a Skeleton", Ross Rocklynne; "The Weapons Shop", A.E. van Vogt; "Nerves", Lester del Rey; "Daymare", Frederic Brown; "Killdozer!", Theodore Sturgeon; "No Woman Born", C.L. Moore; "The Big and the Little", Isaac Asimov; "Giant Killer", A. Bertram Chandler; "E for Effort", T.L. Sherred; "With Folded Hands", Jack Williamson

Fans of Dr. Asimov's non-fiction might like this book, but the subject matter is a little more advanced than in his other non-fiction books. Most of his early books consist of 17 chapters. Science, Numbers and I has 8 chapters on science, 8 chapters on numbers and 1 chapter on Asimov, himself.

Asimov was still developing his voice as a non-fiction author, but it's still a good book, but readers without a science background would be advised to read some of his easier books, like Jupiter and The Planet that Wasn't.

A great accompanyment to a high school chemistry course. High school chemistry is so abstract, that one wonders how chemists ever thought to look at the things they studied to develop the field. Asimov explains what concrete problems and concerns led to the development of each important discovery, situating it in terms of what was understood at the time, and making the logic of the field's development clear. Easy enough for the non-scientist, but with lots of material I never learned in my science education. Asimov was a great popularizer!