This book combines a description of about fifty important textile machines with an analysis of their evolution. Each machine is dealt with in the context of its time, showing the impact that even a simple device like the fulling stocks had on textile production. The greater organisation of the domestic system in the eighteenth century gave impetus to the development of machines like the dandy loom and the spinning jenny. The author examines the revolutionary inventions of the late eighteenth century and how they led to the industrialisation of the textile industry.

With the recent biomedical discovery on the human genome, what lies in store for new medicine? In LIFE SCRIPT, Nicholas Wade claims that medicine is still in its dark age. We think of our medicine as sophisticated but a few decades from now much of it may be regarded with the same horror as we view the barber-surgeons of the 18th century. But with the human genome now in hand, we can begin to lay the foundation for understanding the body. Decoding genomic information is leading to a revolution -- the genome and new cell biology will create the basis for a new medicine. Consider a new way of healing the body: instead of cutting the flesh with scalpels, poisoning it with chemical drugs or burning it with radiation, the physician would gently treat the body with nothing but cells and proteins, seeking to mend like with like; instead of depending only on his own knowledge, the physician would seek to tap the information in the genome, and to exploit the fact that the body's cells are designed to be a self-assembling system, when given the right signals. LIFE SCRIPT will explore how we will be affected, from the benefits of cancer treatments and immunisation to the grey moral areas of genetic engineering and longevity. Possession of the genome, states Wade, is a loss of innocence, in that it puts an unprecedented kind of power into our hands; sooner or later we will have to choose whether to use it, and to what end.

Recent years have seen several fascinating Australian autobiographies and there are, of course, a number of excellent general texts on today's environmental problems, though few of them focus on the Australian scene. What Graham Chittleborough has done in masterly fashion is to combine the two genres and garnish the whole with piquant experiences of Australian politics and bureaucracy. This is a striking account both of his life as an ecologist and of what the lives of our grandchildren may prove to be unless we mend our environmental ways. His focus is Australia but his reach is global and there are few parts of the world and few environmental problems left unvisited. No mere cassandra, he proposes remedies as well as sounds warnings, and with it all he is as entertaining as he is instructive.

Such contributors as Diane Ackerman, Anthony Aveni, and other top scientists emphasize the breadth and humanity of scientific endeavors as they fuse hard science with personal anecdotes in essays

"This is an extremely important piece of work. In an unpretentious fashion, Roy challenges the traditional wisdom on communal riots and raises bold new questions about how they might be understood. A lucid piece of writing, Some Trouble with Cows is a pleasure to read."—Amrita Basu, author of The Two Faces of Protest "A brilliant contribution to the study of group conflict, written with immediacy and clarity."—Bob Blauner, author of Black Lives, White Lives

Monografie over het westerse onvermogen een antwoord te formuleren op de (economische) veranderingen die zich in Azië voltrekken.