Book reviews Desktop Computers. By Richard A. Hen/e and B. W. Kuvshinoff. Pp. 650. Oxford University Press. 7993. Paperback f 79.50 ISBN 079 5070313.

The computer-minded reader can keep up-to-date with technology by devouring magazine articles - if they have been collecied and catalogued logically. Deskfop Computers combines all the topics one might find in such articles into one thick paperback, and is a must for the budding system manager, or purchaser who needs the jargon and mystery explained in full - or the expert who needs to fill in the gaps. It is not a book to read from cover to cover; rather to be dipped into and consulted frequently, as one’s experience grows. The books covers hardware principles, operating systems, peripherals, and networking, in depth.

The world of the desktop computer is moving so fast that it is difficult for writers or publishers to keep up-to-date. When is the best time to publish? Wait for the IBM/Apple Power PC? Wait for Windows NT or the 80586 processor? This volume is acceptably up-to-date by covering the near-present to 1992 with enormous technical thoroughness. It packs a decade of computer technical history into perspective, and speculates intelligently into the future.

It is predominantly concerned with the Intel (IBM compatibles) family, although other types are included and compared, not unfavourably. The authors have striven to be universal and fair, but this reviewer would advise a Mac enquirer to get a volume more specific to the Macintosh. For PC users it will be outstandingly helpful.

David Nicholson-Cole

Predicting the Future. Edited by Leo Howe and Alan Wain. Pp. 195. Cambridge Univer- sity Press. 7993. Hardback f16.95, US $29.95 ISBN 0 521 41323 0.

Aerodynamics is a science, based on an impressive body of precise theory. Yet no aeroplane designer would be prepared to predict the performance of a new design without wind tunnel and other tests. Frank Hahn uses this example to show that there is really nothing unusual in his own discipline of economics, or indeed social sciences generally, being incapable of making reliable predictions. It is one of many thoughtful passages in this unusual, enticing though uneven collection of essays based on the sixth annual series of Darwin College Lectures given in Cambridge in 1991. There is little or nothing in common between many of the contributors - for example, Stephen Hawking, who discusses the possibility that the future of the Universe may be to return to its beginning, and Don Cupitt, whose demythologizing of theology has now gone so far that his view of ‘the last judgement’ is that no one believes it either literally or metaphysically any more and that such ideas are simply nice to have around as background

Endeavour, New Series, Volume 17, No. 4, 1993. 0160-9327/93 $6.00 + 0.00. Pergamon Press Ltd. Printed in Great Britain.

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poetry. Ian Kennedy contributes a typically thoughtful chapter on the social, political, and personal dilemmas that are being prompted by advances in fields such as genetic screening and reproductive technology. But why no less than four contributions out of eight should be backward-looking and/or centred on religious belief is a puzzIe. An entertaining but much too variegated pot-pourri.

Bernard Dixon

Science in Russia and the Soviet Union. A Short History. By Loren R. Graham. Pp. 327. Cambridge University Press. 1993. Hardback f30.00, US $29.95 ISBN 0 527 24566.

This is a most timely and useful addition to the Cambridge History of Science series. Save for Z.A. Medvedev’s So&r Science (Oxford 1978) - a good but less comprehensive work - there is nothing comparable available at the present time. Moreover, it is particularly timely in that it has gone to press late enough to discuss the fate of Russian science, and scientists, after the break- up of the USSR in 1991. As a postscript we now have available the Royal Society’s Academies of Science in the Constiment Republics of the Former Soviet Union (1992). The author has a long and deep knowledge of this complex subject - as two earlier works on soviet science testify - and marshalls his material systematically and clearly.

He writes perceptively and - especially for the 70 years of communist rule - gives us an insight into how things looked to Soviet scientists almost entirely cut off from the rest of the world. This is particularly apparent in his sections on the Lysenko controversy and on dialectical materialism.

The main text is divided into three parts dealing respectively with the tsarist period, the Marxist revolution, and science and Soviet society. It concludes with a 50-page analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of Russian and Soviet science, together with bibliographical notes and a comprehensive index.

Altogether an outstanding and very useful book. Trevor 1. Williams

Deciphering Science and Technology. The Social Relations Expertise. Edited by /an Varcoe, Maureen McNeil and Steven Yeartey. Pp. 256. Macmillan, London, 7990. US $65.00 ISBN 0 333 46554 7.

Sociologists and historians of science have been poring ever more intently in recent years over the real texture of science, the attitudes and motivations of scientists, and the interplay between the laboratory world and the wider community. The results have not always been to the taste of the subjects themselves, who to a large degree have simply ignored this growing scholar- ship and its literature. But here is a collection of nine different studies within the genre that could in principle commend themselves to a much wider

readership. The only problem is whether a book ranging over employment restructuring in Britain during the 198Os, the conduct of medical consultations in an echocardiography unit, and disputations over the alleged hazards of visual display units, is sufficiently focused to merit reviews in journals read by individuals in these and six other specialities. I fear not, and that even the editors’ effort to pull the varied strings together in their introduction will not succeed in projecting his valuable little book beyond the confines of the academic community of science and technology watchers represented by its 16 contributors.

Bernard Dixon

Biomolecular Spectroscopy Part A. Edited By R.J.H. Clark and R.E. Hester. Pp. 383. Wiley. 7993. Hardback ff20 ISBN 0 471 93806 8.

This is Volume 20 of the well etablished Advances in Spectroscopy series. It is the first of two books devoted to biomolecular spectroscopy; the second was published in June 1993. Part A contains eight chapters developed from leading-edge research presentations made at the recent 4th European Conference on the Spectroscopy of Biological Molecules and thus represents a timely and authoritative review of a wide range of topics in this rapidly developing area of science. The emphasis is on probing structure and bonding in molecular biology and on the relationship of structure to function and the dynamics of changes that occur in solution phase reactions of biomolecules. The specific topics covered in this volume are: Infrared Spectroscopic Investigations of Retinal Proteins; Ultraviolet Resonance Raman Studies of Proteins and Related Model Com- pounds; Vibrational Spectroscopic Studies of Enzyme-Substrate Complexes; Structure-Function Relationships in Peroxidases; Genetically Inserted Tryptophan in Protein Spectroscopy; Raman Microscopy of Single Whole Cells; Biomedical Applications of Surface-Enhanced Raman Spec- troscopy; FTIR Determination of Conformational Disorder in Biological Membranes. The treatment throughout strikes a good balance between the needs of the general reader and the research specialist. It will be of value to all interested in a timely overview of the state of the art in these areas of biomolecular spectroscopy.

R. E. Hester

Structure Formation in the Universe. By T. Padmanabhan. Pp. 483. Cambridge Univer- sity Press. 7993. Hardback f50.00, US $89.95 ISBN 0 52141448 2; paperback f 19.95, US 34.95 ISBN 0 521 42486 0.

This book satisfies a growing need for a graduate- level textbook in the fashionable area of physical cosmology. The number of real facts in cos- mology has increased greatly - the microwave background, our velocity in space, the evolution of quasars, the dominance of dark matter, huge clusters of galaxies. Theory has also made