2156 Book Reviews

chapter deals with land degradation. It is concerned with the impor- tance that enviromnental inventory should (but does not yet) have in determining the level of economic activity of nations. The empha- sis is on land degradation, with deforestation, shifting of cultivation and soil erosion as major examples. Economic modeling of these activities is summarized, with the objective of avoiding misallocation of resources and loss of welfare. Estimates of the economic costs of, e.g., soil erosion in Java (315 to 450 million US dollars per year) are given. As this is the only chapter dealing with economic evaluation of enviromnental changes, I would have liked to see a wider spectrum of environmental issues including, for instance, an economic viewpoint on the value of a landscape or of the preserva- tion of an ecosystem, etc., on which work is now being done using, for instance, contingency evaluation methods.

A short index is provided but does not seem very useful, as the word selection is poor; for instance, greenhouse gases, which are discussed in many chapters, are not listed, nor is ill-posedness, gen- eral circulation models, fractal, variogram, etc. I found, however, the word “posedness,” the meaning of which is not quite clear to me.

In short, this books provides a broad overview of a large number of general environmental modeling problems. If one knows nothing

about environmental modeling, this book provides a good start in the understanding of the concepts, assumptions, and algorithms used in such models. Parameter identification and validation of the models is a recurring issue in most chapters. The reader will enjoy finding a very large spectrum of environmental issues covered in relatively brief chapters, with many references, even if these references are very biased towards one type of culture. The environmental models that are described are, in general, of a global type, such as climate change models or they address near-natural systems, for example, hydrological models. Heavily polluted areas or localized environ- mental problems, are outside the scope of the book. A major absentee is also the use of geostatistical methods, which are becoming increas- ingly important in environmental sciences. However, I would not recommend the book to students specializing in any one area of environmental modeling or to practicing professionals, as they will only find generalities that they most likely know already. But it is probably impossible to both cover such a wide range of topics and include significant new concepts.

Laboratoire de Giologie Appliqub Vniversite’ Paris VI

Ghislain de Marsily

75252 PARIS cedex 05, France

Granitoid Rocks: Studies and Analyses, Siberia and Mongolia, Min- eral Potentialities edited by A. B. Vistelius. Theophrastus, 1995 (ISBN %O-7457-09-9).

This may be the only petrology/geochemistry book with a connec- tion to social issues. Underlying the main feature of this book- 4659 chemical compositions of Mesozoic granitoids in the eastern Soviet Union and Mongolia-is a history about geologists and chemists who collected and analyzed igneous rocks as prisoners of Stalin’s GULAG. Their fate was a consequence of Stalin’s mecha- nism for enriching his state from the time of the Bolshevik Revolu- tion until his death in 1953 by sentencing geologists, as well as laymen, to explore for gold in the nonstop harshness of the Asian landscape east of the 1OO”E meridian. En route to meeting Stalin’s mandate to underpin the Soviet economy, these servants to the re- gime inadvertantly spun off a valuable academic data bank. Namely, this granitoid-rocks book is a by-product of their efforts in its presen- tation of thousands of Mesozoic granitoid locations in eastern Asia and their major-element compositions. Of course, this massive col- lection of rock chemical compositions would never exist had it not been for the 1960s crusade of A. B. Vistelius, editor of this book, to rescue aging data-sheets from the files of disaggregating Soviet geological surveys.

As it stands, Vistelius’ compilation is a nobel effort and tribute to those who literally gave their identities and, in some cases their lives, to mineral resources exploration of Russia. The book, however, has only fifty pages of text, which are skeletal against its hundreds of pages (unnumbered) of data tables. The book, in fact, is so laden with data that any quick assessment of its contents is reminiscent of fanning the pages of a telephone book-each page monotonously the same, containing about twenty compositions of granite and

granodiorite samples and listings for their latitude-longitude loca- tions.

The text includes a preface by the editor, which is the most inter- esting reading in the book due to its historic value, followed by four articles written by Soviet geologists. Each article is brief and thin on discussions, but some provide a first pass at relating rock major- element compositions to tectonic settings and at applying discrimina- tion diagrams. For example, there are some histograms for weight percent oxides, some groupings of rock types according to SiO, contents, and some references to the rock compositions in the context of the massifs and magmatic belts of eastern Asia. One sore aspect of the book is the virtual absence of maps to provide a sense of how these samples relate geologically and geographically. The only illustration for sample locations comes well into the book (p. 39) as a rough sketch-map depicting all of eastern Asia.

The book is not compelling enough for me to suggest that it belongs on the shelf of every igneous petrologist, but as a data reference-particularly for SiO&h rock types-it should have a place in institutional libraries. Typos and misspellings are common, but are not necessarily annoying in view of the obstacles that a few concerned Soviet scientists needed to overcome to acquire the data, let alone the monumental task of organizing it for publication. But the errors do call to question the publisher’s editorial staff. Finally, this book should be considered by anyone curious about relationships between granitoid compositions and tectonic regimes-and with the patience to type nearly 4700 entries of rock compositions and sample latitudes and longitudes into a spreadsheet. Department of Marine, Earth, R. V. Fodor

and Atmospheric Sciences North Carolina State University Raleigh, NC 27695, USA

Neptune and Triton edited by D. P. Cruikshank. University of Arizona Press, 1995, xiii + 1178p.. US $110.00 (ISBN o-8165-1525-5).

Neptune and Triton, the twenty-fifth book published since 1974 by the University of Arizona Press in its Space Science Series, is a mammoth hard-bound presentation of nearly everything known about Neptune and its satellites and rings. Neptune and Triton, at 1249 pages and written by a collaboration of seventy-eight authors, is about the average length for recent publications in this series, which has a trend toward ever more massive books. But it is no average big book.

The front cover’s artistic portrayal of an active geyser-like plume on Triton (by Ron Miller and William Hartmann) embodies just a few of the dynamic processes operating at the distant fringe of our solar system. The beautiful cover painting gives this volume the appeal of a coffee table atlas to another exotic place in the solar system, but in fact the twenty-three chapters of Neptune and Triton were written by the best experts in their subdisciplines. Those famil- iar with the Space Science Series expect the finest technical reviews, the most comprehensive modeling, and the most exhaustive biblio- graphic references to fill in any details that somehow cannot be accommodated in 1249 pages. Neptune and Triton has all this.