304A Volume 51, Number 8, 1997

Thomas J. Vickers, Editor

Please forward book reviews to the Book Review Editor, Dr. Thom-as J. Vickers, Department of Chemistry, Florida State University,Tallahassee, Florida 32306-3006.

Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Nar-rative. Edward R. Tufte. Graphics Press, Cheshire, Connecticut,1997. Pp. 156. $45. ISBN 0-961-3921-26.

This is an unusual book to be reviewed in Applied Spectroscopy.I was put off by the title of the book and by the accompanyinginformation that described the book as `̀ about pictures of verbs’ ’ ,but as I thumbed through the book its elegance drew me in for acloser inspection of its content. Spectroscopists are by nature drawnto `̀ visual explanations’ ’ . That is, after all, what spectra are. Clearlythis book addresses questions that ought to be of interest to all ofus concerned with presenting our ideas on slides, graphs, video-tapes, and web pages.

This book is the most recent of three books on information designwritten and published by Edward Tufte. He teaches courses in sta-tistical evidence and information design at Yale. The earlier booksare titled The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (1983) andEnvisioning Information (1990).

The ® rst part of Visual Explanations examines the logic of de-picting quantitative evidence. It is particularly concerned with theconnection between the way in which evidence is displayed anddecision-making. Two examples stand out in my mind. In the ® rst,the correct identi® cation of the origin of a cholera epidemic in Lon-don in 1854, the cause and solution of the problem followed in-exorably from a clear, logical display of the evidence. In the second,the ¯ awed decision to launch the space shuttle Challenger in 1986,Tufte claims the outcome also followed from the data presentation.He makes a case that the disaster ¯ owed not so much from a lackof information as from a failure to present the available informationin a form that could be readily apprehended by the decision-makers.

The second part of the book is concerned with questions of de-sign that are more visual than quantitative. It addresses matters suchas choice of color scales, linewidth, and line density, and the con-nection between these and the clarity and information content ofgraphical presentations. On the basis of my own experience inwatching presentations at scienti® c meetings, I think there is muchhere that should be of interest to experienced as well as tyro speak-ers. The improved accessibility of color for slides, for example, hasnot always improved the clarity of the visual presentations. Startlingcolor schemes may keep the audience awake, but as Tufte pointsout they may also obscure, rather than enhance, the content of thepresentation.

Throughout the book there is concern for maintaining the integ-rity of information, that is, assuring that the visual display does notconceal or distort the underlying facts. The book itself exempli® esthe ideas discussed. It provides many examples of good and baddesign in visual presentations taken from both art and science, in-cluding even a chapter on magic and disinformation design. Al-though the book is not written speci® cally for spectroscopists, the

design strategies discussed are certainly relevant to the presentationof scienti® c information.

THOMAS J. VICKERS

Department of ChemistryFlorida State UniversityTallahassee, Florida 32306-3006

NMR of Polymers. Frank A. Bovey and Peter A. Mirau. AcademicPress, San Diego, California, 1996. Pp. 459. $85. ISBN 0-12-119765-4.

The purpose of this book, as stated by the authors in the preface,is to provide a brief general survey of nuclear magnetic resonanceapplications in polymer characterization and to illustrate the typesof polymer structural and dynamic problems that can be solved byusing NMR. The book ful® lls its purpose and provides considerablebackground on the fundamentals of NMR spectroscopy, as well.While the authors do not attempt to reference all available publi-cations, the book is up to date and contains many references through1994 ± 1995. The book does not discuss NMR applications to bio-polymers, such as DNA, RNA, peptides, and proteins. The authorsinclude some discussions of polymerization mechanisms and mod-els in relation to polymer structure and NMR spectral features.

The book has ® ve major divisions: NMR fundamentals; polymerchain microstructure; solution characterization of polymers; char-acterization of polymers in the solid state; and polymer dynamics(in solution and in solids). One quarter of the 453 pages of text isdevoted to the fundamentals of NMR spectroscopy, including ex-perimental methods. This coverage seems a little excessive, but itdoes review well the principles and experiments necessary to helpanyone understand the rest of the book. The authors also presentand discuss the important mathematical equations and theoreticalconcepts in the text. The book is not a handbook or lab guide andpresents little information on sample preparation or instrument pa-rameter selection.

Although the book will be useful to many readers, there are afew weaknesses to the book. A clever (or annoying?) feature ofmodern NMR is the extensive use of acronyms for experiments. Itwould have been helpful to include an appendix of NMR experi-ment acronyms used in the text and the types of information ob-tained from each. The index also seems short for the length of thebook and the variety of topics covered. An appendix of experimentacronyms with the information provided by the experiment as wellas a longer index would have helped readers to better locate andunderstand needed information. Last, some of the ® gures in thebook did not reproduce well from the original literature.

Overall, however, the book is well written and should be partic-ularly valuable to industrial and academic labs studying a varietyof polymers and related problems.

DR. LARRY S. SIMERAL

Albemarle CorporationTechnical CenterP.O. Box 14799Baton Rouge, Louisiana 70898

APPLIED SPECTROSCOPY 305A

BOOK BRIEFS

Ultrafast Processes in Spectroscopy. Edited by O. Svelto, S. De Sil-vestri, and G. Denardo. Plenum Press, New York, 1996. Pp. 668.$149.50. ISBN 0-306-45481-5.

This volume is a collection of papers presented at the Ninth Inter-national Symposium on Ultrafast Processes in Spectroscopy held at theInternational Centre for Theoretical Physics, Trieste, October 30± No-vember 3, 1995. This meeting brought together workers from a varietyof disciplines sharing common interests in the generation of ultrashortoptical pulses and their application to studies of ultrafast phenomena inphysics, chemistry, material science, electronics, and biology. The vol-ume includes 148 short reports (typically three to four pages) organizedin sections headed ultrashort pulse lasers; ultrafast spectroscopy of at-oms and molecules; ultrafast nonlinear optical phenomena; ultrafastspectroscopy of semiconductors; generation and applications of intenseultrashort pulses; frequency conversion; ultrafast nonlinear optics in or-ganics; applications of ultrafast lasers in medicine and ultrafast pro-cesses in biophysics; ultrafast spectroscopy of metals, insulators, andcon® ned systems; new ultrafast measurement techniques; superconduc-tors and terahertz spectroscopy; and ultrafast optoelectronics.

Spectroscopy and Dynamics of Collective Excitations in Solids. Ed-ited by Baldassare Di Bartolo. Plenum Press, New York, 1997. Pp. 671.$135. ISBN 0-306-45390-8.

The organizers of the meeting that generated this book of the pro-ceedings hoped to provide a forum for the critical assessment and eval-uation of recent and past developments in the physics of solids. Themeeting was held in Erice, Italy, from June 17 to July 1, 1995. Thismeeting was organized by the International School of Atomic and Mo-lecular Spectroscopy of the `̀ Ettore Majorana’ ’ Centre for Scienti® cCulture. The book contains about 20 fully developed papers of varyinglength and one-page abstracts of short seminar.

Analytical Use of Fluorescent Probes in Oncology. Edited by ElliKohen and Joseph G. Hirschberg. Plenum Press, New York, 1996. Pp.448. $125. ISBN 0-306-45369-X.

This book contains the proceedings of the NATO Advanced ResearchWorkshop held in Miami in October 1995 on the topic described by thebook’ s title. The stated aim of the workshop was to highlight the sig-ni® cance of ¯ uorescence work for the understanding of cell and tissuephysiology, physiopathology, and pharmacology, particularly in termsof the analytical use of ¯ uorescent probes in oncology. The goal wasto bring together researchers in the various disciplines of tissue optics,imaging, microspectro¯ uorometry, and state-of-the-art probes, in orderto explore the full bene® ts that can be derived in biomedicine throughthe convergence of these approaches. Forty-seven presentations are rep-resented in the book.