BRILL

Adhesion aspects in dentistry.

This reference for professionals contains a total of 19 papers, including overviews and original research, covering ramifications of adhesion in dentistry. Papers are organized in sections on adhesion and bonding aspects, mechanics and durability, and adhesion testing. Specific topics include resin bonding to oxide ceramics for dental restorations, comparison of different etching agents and repair materials used on feldspathic porcelain, bond-disruptive stresses generated by resin composite polymerization in dental cavities, thermocycling effects on resin bond to silicatized and silanized zirconia, and shear bond strength of cement to zirconia. B&w photos and images are included. The book is based on a Special Issue of the Journal of Adhesion Science and Technology, vol. 23, nos. 7-8 (2009). VSP is a subsidiary of Brill. (Annotation ©2009 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Advances in Mesopotamian medicine from Hammurabi to Hippocrates; proceedings.

As the title suggests by referring to the sick eye and the evil eye, the workshop encompassed both medical and magical aspects of ancient medicine. European Assyriologists, and one scholar of Greek compare Babylonian medicine with other contemporary systems of medicine in the region, explore the relationships between magic and medicine, and examine the social role of medicine and therapy within Babylonian society. They cover the Babylonian physician Raba-sa-Markuk, the Accadian verb sala'u (to be ill) and the substantive sili'tu, medical information outside the medical corpora, cuneiform tablets on eye diseases, medical technology in ancient Mesopotamia, and (in French) the medicine of Hippocrates. (Annotation ©2009 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

The astronomical tables of Giovanni Bianchini.

The tables of Bianchini (d. after 1469) are the largest set produced in the West before modern times, and historians of astronomy Chabás (U. Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona) and Goldstein (emeritus U. of Pittsburgh) have long wanted to discover the key that he used to construct them. Now they have, and contend that though the tables are not innovative in their building blocks, they reflect a well defined approach to astronomy, a practical way of presenting it, and a solid computing ability. Their first chapter outlines Bianchini's life and work, and the second analyzes his tables in the 1492 and 1526 printed editions and in two manuscripts. (Annotation ©2009 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

The China environment yearbook, v.3; crisis and opportunities.

This, the third English language volume produced by China's eminent Friends of Nature environmental organization, covers the primary issues and events of 2007. Topics include national debates regarding air and water pollution, such as the Lake Taihu algae bloom crisis, environmental protests in the city of Xiamen, the challenges faced by organizers of the 2008 Beijing Olympics to create a "green" event, and the adverse impacts of climate change. It also illustrates a broad view of emerging Chinese environmental politics: a more insistent citizenry, the development of interest groups, and international influences on domestic policy debate. Well-researched and written, the yearbook will greatly interest both scholars and policy makers concerned about how China's environmental choices will affect the future of the country and the world. Editor Yang, an educator at Beijing Institute of Technology and president of Friends of Nature, and 21 co-authors contributed to the book. (Annotation ©2009 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Communities and crisis; Bologna during the Black Death.

Kelly (history, University of Missouri, Kansas City) goes beyond the chronicles and literary memoirs of the Plague in Italy. She has painstakingly researched the wills drawn up in Bologna in 1348, at the height of the epidemic, with a control study of wills made ten years previously. Her work turns up evidence that many of the suppositions made on the base of later stories are not borne out by the data. She found that families seem not to have deserted the sick, nor did neighbors. Many of the wealthy stayed in the town. The main mention of the plague in the records of the city council is proclamations remitting taxes because of the disaster. Kelly's study is an excellent example of the necessity of starting with primary records rather than secondary sources. Her appendices list the names of officials, testators and witnesses. (Annotation ©2009 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

The commentary of al-Nayrizi on Books II-IV of Euclid's Elements of Geometry; with a translation of that portion of Book I missing from ms Leiden or. 399.1 but present in the newly discovered Qom manuscript edited by Rudiger Arnzen.

Lo Bello (mathematics, Allegheny College, Meadville, PA) has updated his earlier translation of al-Nayziri's commentary on Euclid to include a recently discovered manuscript containing a heretofore lost section of the text. In his introduction, Lo Bello describes the manuscript sources in Latin and Arabic and their relationship to an unknown early translation from Greek into Arabic. He also reviews the discussion concerning authorship. This commentary is important not only for the remarks made by al-Nayrizi but for the fact that al-Nayrizi repeats the exegesis of other writers, particularly that of Simplicious, which has been lost. The fact that Lo Bello understands both Arabic and geometry enhances his elegant translation. (Annotation ©2009 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Contact angle, wettability and adhesion; v.6: Proceedings.

Because wettability plays an essential role in many industrial processes, this property measured in terms of contact angle, is of growing interest from theoretical as well as applied perspectives in the materials science and technology field. In this volume in a series that is a valuable contribution to the field, Mittal (a U.S. consultant) introduces 25 edited papers from the Sixth International Symposium held at the University of Maine, Orono, July 14-16, 2008, that cover multiple aspects of contact angle, wettabilty, and adhesion. International contributors discuss fundamentals of the wetting of solids by liquids; material control and modification (e.g., laser-induced changes to surface structures); superhydrophobic surfaces (e.g., self-cleaning windows, nanofluids); and the relevance of wettability to surface free energy. Illustrated but not indexed. VSP is a subsidiary of Brill. (Annotation ©2009 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Creating shapes in civil and naval architecture; a cross-disciplinary comparison.

The 14 articles of this collection were offered at the December 2006 Workshop held at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany. Though they discuss construction of ships and buildings over a wide span of time, from the ancient Mediterranean world of the Hittites, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans to the late Middle Ages, the papers are unified by a common focus on the issue of shape creation, making the collection coherent and useful to a broad range of readers. Individual paper topics include analysis of the use of geometry on the late Roman ships in Mainz, Germany; classical approaches to curvature in Corinthian capitals and amphitheaters; and late medieval vault geometry. Several of the articles detail methodologies for the study of shape creation and building replicas. Appendices are included on technical aspects such as molds and curves and a bibliography of historical metrology. Over 50 color plates supplement the text. (Annotation ©2009 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Diptera diversity; status, challenges, and tools.

The order Diptera (true flies) contains an estimated 240,000 species of flies, mosquitos, gnats, midges, etc. although only about half have been described. Pape (Zoological Museum, Natural History Museum of Denmark), Bickel (Australian Museum), and Meier (biological sciences, National U. of Singapore) present eight chapters that summarize and update current taxonomic knowledge on Diptera diversity, and the current state of the research field The chapters regionally cover the Diptera of the Nearctic, Hawaii, the Neotropics, the Galápagos, the Palaearctic, the Afrotropical region, Asia, Australia, and the Southwest Pacific. (Annotation ©2009 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Electrically conductive adhesives.

Such adhesives are of high interest as substitutes for the environmentally destructive lead-solder interconnects that are now routinely used in microelectronic packaging applications. Fundamentally they are composed of an epoxy or other polymer resin, with an electrically conductive filler, but the combination and proportions of materials can vary considerably. Electrical, mechanical, and chemical engineers and scientists explore recent developments, mechanical durability and reliability aspects, and characterization and properties. Among specific topics are anisotropic conductive adhesives for flip-chip interconnects, aspect ratio and loading effects of multi-wall carbon nanotubes in epoxy, the chemorheology of epoxy/nickel conductive adhesives during processing and cure, and electrical properties of copper-filled adhesives and pressure-dependent conductive behavior of copper particles. There is no index. VSP is a subsidiary of Brill. (Annotation ©2009 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Fatal thirst; diabetes in Britain until insulin.

A specialist on early modern medicine, Furdell (history, U. of North Florida) explores the impact of the disease on patients and society in English, focusing particularly on the period before 1920. She draws on published and unpublished medical casebooks, printed books and articles for a broad readership, and recorded reactions of diabetics themselves to construct both a biography of the disease itself and a social history of its effects. After tracing the history of diabetes from classical times to the Renaissance, she looks at changing treatments, published advice and imagery, the 17th-century medical controversy, reconstructing diabetic life, competition for a cure during the long 19th century, and the impact of insulin. (Annotation ©2009 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

The Hippocratic treatise On glands.

A new edition of the venerable Hippocratic text on the human lymphatic system. In her introduction, Craik shows how On Glands fits into the body of Hippocrates' medical writings and places the work into the context of ancient scientific knowledge. The extensive commentaries examine the treatise in terms of the scientific content and in how Hippocrates (and his transcribers and translators) used language to describe that content. Her volume will be of particular interest to scholars of the history of science and medicine. Craik was professor of classics at Kyoto University, and is now affiliated with the University of St. Andrews and the University of Newcastle. The book includes modern diagrams of the lymphatic system. (Annotation ©2009 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Interfacial rheology.

Interfacial rheology is the study of the flow properties of interfaces, properties that are important in determining the behavior of liquid films, emulsions, and foams. In what is presented as perhaps the first book devoted exclusively to this topic, Miller and Liggieri (Instituto pr la Energetica e le Interfasi, Genoa, Italy) introduce 16 papers that present the historical and theoretical background of this field, frequently-used experimental techniques for studying dilational and shear rheology of layers at liquid/gas and liquid/liquid interfaces, and recent experiments. The opening chapter by Valery Krotov, a Russian scientist in whose memory the book is dedicated, provides an overview of the fundamentals with examples of the two-dimensional continuum and equations for ideal interfacial surfactant layers. (Annotation ©2009 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

John the Physician's Therapeutics; a medical handbook in vernacular Greek.

In this unique and rare publication, Zipser (Royal Holloway U. of London, UK) provides, for the first time, a translation of two versions of the first edition of Therapeutics, a Greek medical handbook from the thirteenth century by John the Physician, who discusses medicine as a craft and describes new developments and innovations of Byzantine medicine, and common diseases and guidelines on how to prepare medication. She provides both the original version, in Byzantine Greek, and its translation into the vernacular, as well as English translations of them on facing pages. She also provides background on the history of the text, its development, and sources, historical context and the language, and provides some selected paragraphs of the commentary version of the text. (Annotation ©2009 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Just wars and moral victories; surprise, deception and the normative framework of European war in the later Middle Ages.

Whetham (of the Defence Studies Department of King's College London, based at the Joint Services Command and Staff College in the UK Defence Academy) conducts an analysis of the practical, moral, legal, and metaphysical understandings of stratagems of surprise and deception in medieval European warfare during the Hundred Years War (c.1337-1453). He describes the state of the just war tradition up to the beginning of the era; examines the legal framework governing the use of violence; and analyzes such texts as the Epitome of Military Science by Vegetius, the Demandes and the Book of Chivalry by Geoffroy de Charny, and the Chronicles by Jean Froissart, moving from the more abstract to the actual practice of surprise and deception along the way. (Annotation ©2009 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Poison in small measure; Dr. Christopherson and the cure for bilharzia.

Crichton-Harris continues her study of medical and colonial history by writing about her own uncle, who spent nearly two decades as a physician to Europeans and Africans in Sudan. The pivot of her study is Christopherson's (1868-1955) spectacular discovery of a cure for the debilitating and sometimes fatal parasitic disease also called schistosomiasis. She places his story in the context of the family as representative of a particular class in imperial England, the context of his own life and career, and the context of the rise of tropical medicine. Her topics include smallpox in Sudan 1902-03, the Wellcome Laboratory on the Nile and a relapsing fever dispute, his 1912 marriage and decision to remain in Sudan, with the Red Cross in Serbia, the "aha" moment and its consequences, his post-Africa life as a London consultant, and looking back from the 21st century. (Annotation ©2009 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Polyimides and other high-temperature polymers; synthesis, characterization and applications; v.5.

Twenty-five revised papers from the November 2007 Fifth International Symposium on Polyimides and Other High-Temperature Polymers are collected here, representing both overviews and original research in the domain of polyimides and other high temperature polymers. Material is divided into four parts on synthesis, properties, and bulk characterization, surface and adhesion aspects, applications, and general papers. Topics covered include synthesis of various kinds of polyimides with different characteristics, structure-property relationships, photo-definable polyimides and other materials, and heavy ion irradiation of polyimides. Other subjects are surface modification and adhesion aspects of polyimides, metallization of polyimides, polyimide foam nanocomposites, zeolite modified polyimides, and applications of polyimides in aerospace, micro-electronics, purification of bio-fuels, membrane technology, and moisture absorption. The book is for anyone interested in polyimides and other high temperature polymers. (Annotation ©2009 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Polymer surface modification; relevance to adhesion; v.5.

This volume contains 22 papers from the Sixth International Symposium on Polymer Surface Modification: Relevance to Adhesion, held at the U. of Cincinnati in June of 2007. The papers address surface modification techniques, as well as interfacial aspects and adhesion. Specific topics include generation of nanotopographies on polymeric substrates by cold plasmas, plasma-induced modification of polymer surfaces with widely different adhesion characteristics for cell-based RNA array, effects of Ar-plasma irradiation on dyeing and anti-felting properties of wool fibers, surface modification of plastic films by charged particles, photo-chemical surface modification for the control of cell growth on textile substrates, gas-phase surface functionalization of carbon nanotubes with UV photo-oxidation, direct fabrication of high density polymer nano-dots by excimer laser irradiation of block copolymer masks, adhesion of fluorinated UV-curable coatings to functionalized polyethylene, plasma homo- and copolymerization of allyl alcohol and styrene, and decontamination of heat-sensitive polymer surfaces using low temperature plasma technology. VSP is a subsidiary of Brill. (Annotation ©2009 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Protecting the oceans beyond national jurisdiction; strengthening the international law framework.

Warner (ocean resources and security, U. of Wollongong, Australia) analyzes the current global, sectoral, and regional arrangements for protecting the marine environment beyond national jurisdiction; and examines some options that the United Nations system might pursue to strengthen the legal and institutional framework for protecting this part of the marine environment. She explores the impact of human uses on that half of the planet's surface; the Law of the Sea Convention framework, complementary principles; implementing environmental protection within the exploitation-of-living-resources, maritime transport, and deep-seabed mining sectors; regional implementation; and international initiatives. Martinus Nijhoff is an imprint of Brill. (Annotation ©2009 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Recent advances in polymer nanocomposites.

Chemists and materials scientists describe the preparation, properties, characterization, and application of what has become the dominant class of multicomponent polymer systems. They devote especially detailed attention to the various manufacturing techniques, analyzing morphology, filler dispersion, and interfacial interactions relating to the particular nanocomposite they discuss. Among them are polymer-graphite, polyolefin clay, semiconductor-polymer, and cellulose fibril- and whisker-reinforced polymer composites. Other topics include enhancing properties through nanophased epoxy/foam, determining structure by small-angle scattering, and applications in imaging and display media and as electrolytes in lithium batteries. (Annotation ©2009 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Silanes and other coupling agents; proceedings; v.5.

Silanes are the most popular and commonly used coupling agents/adhesion promoters in such areas as coatings, reinforced composites, dentistry, and biomedicine and have also been shown to be highly effective in corrosion protection of metallic materials. This volume contains the proceedings of the Sixth International Symposium on Silanes and Other Coupling Agents, held at the U. of Cincinnati in June of 2007. The 21 papers cover both of the aforementioned areas of Silane research and include discussion of other coupling agents. Examples of specific topics include the concentration of hydroxyl groups on glass surfaces and their effect on the structure of silane deposits, characterization of silane pretreatment for organic coatings on copper, hydrothermal degradation of hydrophobic organosilane films determined by neutron reflectometry, water absorption and transport in bis-amino silane film, chromate-free silane-containing primer technology, zinc phosphate as an effective anticorrosion pigment in silane-based waterborn primers, application of nanosols to improve functional properties of p-aramide fabrics used for bullet-proof vests, and photocatalytic titania derived by sol-gel technique for textile application. VSP is a subsidiary of Brill. (Annotation ©2009 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Speaking of animals; essays on dogs and others.

Caesar (American literature, Mukogawa U.; English, Clarion U.) provides a linked series of 13 wide-ranging essays that are at times light and on other occasions very serious, but at all times very personal. The author writes of the heart-rending experience he and his wife endured while deciding to have a dog castrated and his inability to kill a raccoon. He also writes of his observations of animals in Spain, reading about the training of big cats, and watching Animal Planet. Even his critical essays of movies and books carry an immediate, intimate quality as he provides an implicit critique and discussions of recent trends in animal studies. The concept of the book works very well, and the research and writing are of high quality. The book will interest anyone from writers to animal lovers. (Annotation ©2009 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Superhydrophobic surfaces.

Based on three Special Issues of the Journal of Adhesion Science and Technology, this book contains 34 papers examining the ramifications of superhydrophobic surfaces, which have water contact angles of greater than 150 degrees (lotus leaves are an example from nature). The papers are organized into five sections discussing fundamentals of superhyrophobicity; superhydrophic surfaces from polymers; superhydrophobic surfaces from silanes, colloids, particles, or sol-gel processes; superhydrophobic surfaces from electrochemical processes; and applications and new insights. Among the specific topics covered are static and dynamic characteristics of nanopatterned surfaces; superhydrophobic micro- and nanostructured surfaces; superhydrophobic materials mased on micro- and nanofibers; superhydrophobic nanofilament coatings; UV-resistant and self-cleaning surfaces; environmentally responsive wettability behavior; the mechanism of the leg of the water strider bug and its walking on water; and such applications as superhydrophobic textile surfaces, superhydrophobic coatings for microdevices, electrowetting on superhydrophobic surfaces, and wetting of surfactant solution on superhydrophobic surfaces. (Annotation ©2009 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)