The authors do a good job of describing the relevant equations needed to model virus dynamics. The book would be a good beginning for mathematicians interested in going into the field of mathematical immunology. And, even though it should be classified as a monograph, rather than a textbook, since there are no problem sets, students of mathematical immunology should find this book a useful introduction to the subject. In addition, the authors give a large list of references at the end of each chapter for further reading.

Mathematicians who need a background in the biology of the HIV virus will find a good discussion in Chapter 2 of the book. The authors give an historical summary of the origins and treatment of the virus in this chapter. This sets the stage for the mathematical modeling of virus dynamics in Chapter 3, where the authors define the basic reproductive ratio and write down a system of three coupled nonlinear ordinary differential equations as the basic equations of virus dynamics. They remark, though without justification, that an analytical solution of the time development is not possible, and so they use approximation schemes to solve the equations. The equations are a phenomenological representation of virus dynamics, and no attempt is made to relate the rate constants to the underlying microscopic properties/structures/processes of viruses. They do however discuss the empirical data associated with studies of SIV infections, and show convincingly there is a correlation between the initial growth of the virus and its value at equilibrium. They caution the reader that the basic model does not give the true reproductive ratio, and show how to correct for this by introducing time delays.

The efficacy of drug therapy is treated from both a mathematical and experimental viewpoint in the next chapter. This is a very enlightening discussion from the standpoint of the validation of the virus models.

The authors switch gears in the next chapter and talk about the dynamics of the Hepatitus B virus. Again, they do a good job of introducing the reader to the experimental evidence for the models of this virus.

In chapter 6, they bring in the contribution of the immune system to the basic equations. They assume that the reader is familiar with the concept of CTL responsiveness. The resulting equations are somewhat more complicated, and the authors show how the ubiquitous Lotka-Volterra equations arise with the virus being the prey, and the immune system the predator. No detailed phase space analysis is done however to study any of the equations in this chapter, which would have been useful to the reader.

The chapter on quasispecies is the most interesting one in the book, as the authors not only give a rudimentary definition of quasispecies, but they also give an indication of their complexity. Disappointingly, they mention the idea of mutation rates and their connection with chaos and self-organized criticality, but do not elaborate on this at all.

The Bonhoeffer's laws of anti-viral treatment are discussed in the next chapter and the authors show how to derive them using the basic model. The emergence of resistance during drug treatment is modeled by parameters which reflect the replication rates of the virus, but these parameters are again not connected with any underlying microscopic properties of the virus.

Some interesting dynamical behavior occurs for the case of multiple epitopes where the existence of quasiperiodic oscillations is shown to occur. They authors refer to this as "unpredictable" but they do not define this term in the book. The existence of quasiperiodic orbits in a dynamical system does not by itself make the system "unpredictable" or random of some sort.

This book is a very addition to the literature, and most importantly, it emphasizes the role of validating mathematical models experimentally, which takes on even greater importance given the medical ramifications of the topics in this book.

I have to admit to being somewhat puzzled by the conclusion drawn by another reviewer of this book who has opined that the book "doesn't deliver on its premise." What it promises are short detective stories of a scope covering the last century and a half which have been written by a number of the better writers of that period. This is exactly what it delivers.

There are stories written by James M. Barrie (he of "Peter Pan" fame), O. Henry (who practically invented the surprise ending and is probably best known for "Gift of the Magi"), Charles Dickens, Jack London, Bret Harte, and on and on.

Writing styles change with time and the detective genre is no exception. A number of the stories are written in the first person, the narrator being the hard-boiled type who refers to all women as "this dame." In contrast, some of the protagonists are thoughtful and analytic while others are gentlemanly men of action.

I never like to end a review of an anthology without picking out at least one selection and telling a little about it. Here goes: "Murder at Rose Cottage" by Edward D. Hoch is a rather genteel British murder mystery. Although of rather recent vintage, it has the feel of something written in an earlier era. There is a murder, but it takes place "off-stage" and there are no gory descriptions or depictions of acts of violence. The murder is solved by an inspector from Scotland Yard who uses deductive reasoning and common sense to figure out "who dunnit." I was impressed by his attitude when he stated that "Death threats are always important." In early twenty-first century America, it is my impression that the prevailing police attitude is that no threat to a common person is worth investigating. "If there's a warm body, we might deign to take a look" seems, to me, to better describe the reaction that one would probably run into. Wouldn't it be nice to live in a world, like the one in this story, where authorities consider keeping us common folk alive every bit as important as catching and prosecuting a suspect in a celebrity crime?

The depiction of those simpler days of more caring attitudes is one of the things that gives this book its charm. As I've stated about a few other books and movies that I've reviewed, this book is not for the type of reader who needs blood, gore, and a thrill a minute to keep his or her interest. It is well worth reading as escape literature for someone who appreciates seeing an analytic mind at work and who prefers his crimes in a relatively non-violent setting.

I purchased this neat hardback book new because of its promise of 100 dastardly detective stories, and was very glad I did.

Anthologies make great reading for someone who goes out to work the next day - read a few stories, and put the book down at a clean stopping point. My problem was that I could not put this neat book down and kept reading way beyond my bedtime! I love books like that!

If you want to get a taste of early to modern detective stories, this book provides them. If you are a writer, this book is a must in your education!

A society which employs Certified Public Accountants presupposes that people will be able to keep track of certain things, certainly money, for sure, and who people are, though this book finds a certain glory in how easy it is to fool official guardians of the identity assumptions with simple tricks. Obviously, this works best at places like Numec, a company specializing in reprocessing nuclear waste, in Apollo, Pennsylvania. Anybody ought to be able to figure out how likely it is that the following events, prior to December 1982, but reported as background information, might have actually occurred:

His two companions were described on their cards as scientists from `The Department of Electronics, University of Tel Aviv, Israel'.
There was no such department.
The men were LAKAM security officers whose task would be to see the best way of stealing fissionable waste from Numec. All three spent four days in Apollo, passing many hours touring the Numec plant, sitting for more hours in Shapiro's office. What they spoke about would remain a secret. On the fifth day Eitan and his companions left Apollo as unobstrusively as they had arrived.
A month later the first of nine shipments of containers of nuclear waste left Numec. Each container would bear the words: `Property of the State of Israel: Ministry of Agriculture'. The containers would carry a stencil stating they had full diplomatic clearance and so were exempt from customs checks before they were stowed on board El Al cargo freighters to Tel Aviv.
The containers were destined for Dimona, Israel's nuclear facility in the Negev Desert. (pp. 55-56)

One way to be a Mogul, buying companies close to bankruptcy and investing enough to turn them into successes, is described in this book as just the starting point for how "Robert Maxwell was the Barnum and Bailey of the financial world, the great stock market ringmaster able to introduce with consummate speed and a crack of his whip some new and even more startling financial act. But increasingly his high-wire actions had become more dangerous - and long ago he had abandoned any idea of a safety net." (p. 34). Maxwell's arrangements with Vladimir Kryuchkov, head of the Soviet KGB, who had been involved in the August plot to oust Mikhail Gorbachev from office, made certain bankers insecure enough to want Maxwell to pay some of their loans. Maxwell thought 400 million pounds might be enough "to stave off his more pressing creditors. He asked Mossad to use its influence with Israel's banker's to arrange a loan. He was told to try to do what his fellow tycoon, Rupert Murdoch, had done when he had faced a similar situation. Murdoch had confessed his plight to his bankers and then renegotiated his debts, which were almost twice what Maxwell owed." (pp. 13-14). Actually, Maxwell must have owed far more than he told the Mossad. A Daily Mirror headline in the photographs section, after the "Maxwell Dies at Sea" picture, reported, "Maxwell: 536m pounds is missing from his firms/ The increasingly desperate actions of a desperate man."

Assuming that much, the rest of the book is written around questions raised by Efraim.

`If the truth about Robert Maxwell surfaces and he is destroyed in the process, who else will be compromised? How great will the damage be to Israel?' (p. 15).

Americans might be interested in this book for judging the current chances for success of American policies that seem to parallel the desperation of Robert Maxwell, but might cause Bill Casey even greater pain, if he were still in charge.

This book is anything but boring--calling this book boring strikes me as a desperate subterfuge by someone who want to keep its explosive contents from fuller circulation. This book is *fascinating* and explosive, not least because of the very well documented coverage it provides of how Israel's intelligence service, the Mossad, used Robert Maxwell to penetrate not just the U.S. government, including the Department of Justice, the military, and the national laboratories, but many foreign governments including the Chinese, Canadians, Australians, and many others, with substantial penetration of their intelligence service databases, all through his sale of a software called PROMIS that had a back door enabling the Mossad to access everything it touched (in simplistic terms).

Also shocking, at least to me, was the extensive detail in this book about how the Israeli intelligence service is able to mobilize Jews everywhere as "sayanim," volunteer helpers who carry out operational (that is to say, clandestine) support tasks to include spying on their government and business employers, stealing documents, operating safehouses, making pretext calls, and so on. I am a simple person: if you are a Jew and a US citizen, and you do this for the Israeli intelligence service, then you are a traitor, plain and simple. This practice is evidently world-wide, but especially strong in the US and the UK.

The book draws heavily on just a couple of former Israeli intelligence specialists to address Israeli use of assassination as a normal technique (and implicitly raises the possibility that it was used against Senator John Tower, who died in small airplane crash and was the primary "agent" for Maxwell and Israel in getting PROMIS installed for millions of dollars in fees all over the US Government).

Finally, the book has a great deal of detail about the interplay between governments, crime families, Goldman Sachs and other major investors, and independent operators like Robert Maxwell who play fast and loose with their employee pension funds.

This book is not boring. Far from it. It is shocking, and if it is only half-right and half-accurate, that is more than enough to warrant its being read by every American, whatever their faith.

Still, there are some noteworthy tales here. While there are a few fantasy-fantasy stories (knights and dragons and minor magic) most of the stories are contemporary tales that, not fitting into the general "fiction" category, ended up as "fantasy." Many times such tales get classified under the "science fiction" category. Many in fact I do recognize from "Analog", "Science Fiction and Fantasy", and "Asimov's" magazines.

Included tales that struck my fancy are "The Edge of the World" (Michael Stanwick), about three bored contemporary teens who decide to descend the abyss at the edge of town. Good sense of wonder in this one (it really does seem to be the Edge of the World since there is an endless stairway that winds its way down, and down, and down endlessly), and the protagonists are real and believable with lots of angst, and confusion about life (and not the Edge itself). "Wong's Lost and Found Emporium" (William Wu) is about a strange shop where you can find things that you have lost; and not just that charm bracelet you lost at the beach but perhaps lost hopes and dreams as well. Not as cliche as it sounds.

The authors participating are (last name only for space): Zelazny, Haldeman, de Lint, Bishop, Martin, Kushner, Foster, Silverberg, Tiptree, Wu, Ellison, Bear, Springer, Le Guin, Norton, Stanwick, Card, Niven.

A Minus: the publishing rights/agency credits are given, but not the sources/bibliography. Each story here came from somewhere else; Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov's, Locus, Interzone, etc. Not a mention of any resource. Some of us like to know this stuff.

It's clear that the publishers of this book elected Silverberg to cough up a fantasy anthology, and he wasn't quite up to the task. Usually he makes better selections when he edits such a book. In fairness I will say that most of the stories here have won, or have been nominated for, the various yearly awards (World Fantasy, Hugo, Nebula, etc.)

If you have three or more contemporary fantasy anthologies, chances are you already have all of the stories in this book. If you do not, and are looking for sword and sorcery, this book isn't it. If you are looking for "contemporary" style fantasy, this may suit your taste.