What is different in the second edition (from its earlier 1960 edition) is the most profitable chapter on Green's functions (ch. 2 of the book). This chapter runs from page 55 to 172 - that is about 127 pages. Prof. Collin, like an articulate storyteller, covers most of the important aspects of Green's functions that an engineer may need to know. This chapter was missing from its 1st edition and hence its inclusion in the 2nd edition has increased the book's worth several fold.

To use the book profitably, I suggest that the reader work through carefully chapters 1 and 2. Also, because this book is intended to be a graduate (advanced) text, the reader muts have a good background in the undergraduate engineering mathematics that EE students are required to take at most universities in USA and abroad.

The life-giving Nile of lower Egypt trickles first from two springs in Burundi and Rwanda and then meanders 4,238 miles as the White Nile through great equatorial lakes; loses itself in tangled and difficult swamps; tortuously emerges to run freely toward its confluence with the much more powerful, if shorter, Blue Nile from Ethiopia; and then flows over cataracts and dams through the great desert to the Mediterranean Sea.

Over five millenniums, the nutrient- and silt-laden Nile floodwaters enabled agriculture and civilization to flourish all along its lower reaches. When the annual summer flood failed, however, the northern Sudan and all of classical and modern Egypt suffered hideously.

Collins links the dark ages of dynastic Egypt and the successes of invading outsiders to those sometimes prolonged periods when the Nile withheld its renewing gift. In turn, those dry spells reflected shifts in the rainfall patterns of equatorial Africa and highland Ethiopia, not - as the Egyptians always feared - to the manipulative scheming of Ethiopian monarchs or African chieftains.

There were many efforts to measure the flows of the Nile, and then to harness it effectively. Taming the Nile, the quixotic goal of administrators from early times, led to the first small dams, and in the early 20th century to dams in the Sudan. President Gamal Abdel Nasser's Aswan High Dam of 1970, with its 300-mile lake and its ancillary dam at Roseires in the Sudan, were together intended to regulate the river forever, smoothing out the years of high and low water. But the mighty Nile refused to capitulate, and the impoundment of its waters has led to great silting and weakening of the dams, the impoverishment of Egyptian agriculture, unexpected disease, and unanticipated economic and social consternation.

Collins's seamless biography captures the soul of a river that is both a result of and a continuing influence upon Africa's geology, climate, history, peoples, economy, and politics. Collins roams over the 2 million-square-mile basin of the Nile - the smaller rivers, the large and tiny lakes, and the glacier-capped mountain ranges - and writes movingly of the glory and challenges faced by the immense cascade of water as it makes its way over myriad waterfalls and past pumping stations, villages, towns, and cities to its ultimate destination. He also captures the trials and triumphs of the Nile's sometimes human- assisted passage through the Sudd - a vast eddying swamp-like mass of lagoons and channels that long defied explorers and entrepreneurs as they attempted to follow the White Nile south into equatorial regions.

Counterintuitively, more of the merged waters of the Nile come from the Blue branch, not the much longer and more tortuous White system. The Blue starts higher than the White, at 9,000 feet, and then rushes into shallow Lake Tana. From shores ringed by Coptic Christian monasteries, the Blue carves a great arc through the lava dikes and sandstone plateaus of western Ethiopia, strengthened by three significant and many minor tributaries until it leaves the highlands and crosses into the Sudan as a source of regular refreshment.

As in any great biography, there are diversions off the main channel. Collins swoops readers into the Baro Salient, that riverine mapmaking mistake that thrusts Ethiopia into the southern Sudan, where commerce coursed clandestinely across borders. He takes us on a fascinating search for 15-foot canaries - not in John Williams' standard "Field Guide to the Birds of East Africa" - high up in the Mountains of the Moon (the Ruwenzori Range). And he supplies unexpected facts. For instance, as mighty as the Nile may be, its volume of fresh water delivered to the Mediterranean is only 2 percent of the total of the Amazon River and 15 percent of that of the Mississippi River. For much of its 160 million-year history, the Nile emptied into the Indian Ocean; only in comparatively recent geological times has it flowed north.

This is an easy book to read and to like. Yet there are occasional anachronisms, where sketches of people or places forsake the findings of modern linguistic and ethnological scholarship, and repetition of pet phrases or factoids. But the book's big flaw is the fault of the publisher: The quality and clarity of the maps and photographs are inadequate for a study as important as this panoramic biography of a pulsing river.

' Robert I. Rotberg directs Harvard's Program on Intrastate Conflict and is president of the World Peace Foundation.

from the January 09, 2003 edition - ...

The Collins First Aid book is tiny enough that you can actually have it around for an emergency. I put one in the car, one in the backpack that I carry around with my toddler, and one at home by the phone. Its diminutive size means that a woman can easily keep it in a purse, or a man in a larger organizer.

Pay particular attention to "Releve", the story contributed by Patricia Wallace and her daughter. This story introduces us to Sydney Bryant, the private eye that Pat Wallace has featured in a terrific series for adults. The titles in the series include "Deadly Devotion" and "Blood Lies".

Other outstanding stories include those by Wendy Hornsby, Scott Turow, Stuart Kaminsky, and Sharyn McCrumb (and their collaborators). This is a book that parents can read and enjoy with their children. It might inspire them to collaborate on some mystery stories of their own!

I look forward to reading the companion volume, "Great Writers and Kids Write Spooky Stories". I

"When you think of a mystery, what comes to mind? A dark secret? An unsolved crime? A curious detective hunting for clues?"

The only mystery, the only secret, the only crime is how this anthology could be so easily overlooked. "Great Writers and Kids Write Mystery Stories" (1996) is a collection of stories written by some of today's greatest mystery authors in collaboration with their children and grandchildren. Jonathan Kellerman, Sharyn McCrumb, and Scott Turow are three of the thirteen award-winning writers that create wonderous whodunits with their offspring, ages 6 to adult.

While written at about the junior high/ middle school level, this complilation is enjoyable to all. The stories are five to several pages. Some are written with the child as the amateur detective, some are written as a type of psychological thriller.

The introduction serves as a "mini-lesson" on mystery writing. And, each story features a short personal introduction by the adult and child writing team on what it was like to collaborate on their included story. Other contributors include Barbara D'Amato, Ed Gorman, Stuart Kaminsky, Elizabeth Engstrom, and many others.

This book has the unique ability to be educational as well as entertaining. Those that enjoy this book may also enjoy the first volume as well: "Great Writers and Kids Write Spooky Stories" (1995).

I have passed this book to countless people I know it's readable quickly and yet you'll use it as a reference for years to come.

Extremely recommended!

Indeed, Browning's masterwork may very well be the ultimate poetic epic in the English language, rivaled certainly not by Spenser, Wordsworth, and Pound but only by Chaucer and Milton. The fact that even the "trial of the century"--the O. J. Simpson case--did not produce widespread renewed interest in its literary predecessor and equivalent would produce surprise and disappointment were I not so aware that, outside of Shakespeare, the academic canon has been foreshortened (and engendered) to a tradition that begins with Virginia Woolf and ends with Sylvia Plath.

In "Ring and the Book" Browning takes the sordid event of an enraged husband murdering his helpless bride--the daughter of a prostitute and rescue project of a priest--to "explain the ways of God to man." The reader of the poem becomes, in effect, a "privileged" juror in the trial of the murderer, positioned through Browning's protean and powerful rhetoric within the consciousness of each of the principals before finally being enabled to glimpse the "truth" that affords meaning to human mutability and suffering.

The poem no doubt will remain in dust closets, largely unread even by literature Ph.D's. But there's little chance of its ever becoming lost. Like the priest-hero of the poem, a few priests of the imagination will ever so often make the poem's discovery and be lured into the quest of pursuing its singular meanings.

On the contrary, this dictionary was the only one my french tutors would accept and this dictionary not only gave examples of when to use the word but it was printed very nicely and they had almost every word I looked up. (I was looking up words like Pre-cambrian Period, so I was quite happy it had most of the words I looked up.)

---Megan W.