This is a truly inspiring book. It presents a way of understanding and expanding one's "autobiographical consciousness," and achieving optimum aging, through reminiscence about one's own life. Sherman presents an impressive, learned exposition of the relevant thinking of many great minds in his explanation of the meaning,elements and processes of aging and consciousness. He gives examples of ordinary people who are very much alive in their accounts of their lives and how they achieved an expanded and self-accepting autobiographical consciousness. This book made for a very helpful emotional and intellectual experience in self-examination of my own life.

The phenomena covered by this monograph have a long history, going back to 1914 papers by Sommerfeld and Brillouin, but the topic is still not completely understood; Sommerfeld's and Brillouin's work contained errors that have since been corrected, but the topic is quite difficult in terms of mathematics, physics, and experimental apparatus and instrumentation, so much progress remains to be made.

However, much progress has already been made, and much of it by the authors of this monograph. I was unaware of it until very recently, and I found it startling and important reading. It has significant practical implications for various fields, but I gather that many people besides me have been completely unaware of the progress made since 1970; I have recent papers on nuclear effects, radar, and high-powered microwave weapons sitting in my office whose authors were obviously unaware of how much progress Oughstun and others have made, and these papers would have been noticeably improved if they had included consideration of what is now known about pulse propagation in causal dielectrics.

So I urge engineers, physicists and others dealing with issues involving steep rise times of electromagnetic pulses to read this book, and consider how it may affect their work and their conclusions.

Prof. Oughstun has been continuing his research on this topic since his book was published in 1994; his more recent papers are listed in his CV on the Web. I hope he will soon issue a revised edition of this monograph, incorporating his more recent results and those of others; that would be a considerable service to the community. I also hope that Oughstun, or somebody, will produce an equally up-to-date monograph about what is now known on the question of how the pulse propagation phenomena described by Oughstun can alter the properties of the causal dielectrics through which the propagation occurs.

I will conclude by saying that because I have been involved off and on since the late 1960s in work that's affected by the material Oughstun covers in this book, I am both mildly surprised and somewhat embarrassed that I, and apparently many others, have been so unaware of it.

Read the book!

This was arguably the greatest book that I have ever read on any topic. Not only was it a great account of General Willie T.'s life, but it also gave great insight into the real meaning of life. If anyone is looking for an answer to anything, then this is the book for you.