Delayed since last autumn's announced date of publication, the long-awaited volume, 'Ancient Egyptian Materials and Technology', edited by Paul T. Nicholson and Ian Shaw was published on March 23, 2000. Professor Nicholson is senior lecturer in Archaeology at Cardiff University and Shaw is lecturer in the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. Both author-editors have numerous publications on Egyptian technology and culture, and are recognised experts on these topics, says Charles Kolb

Anyone who writes a biography of Abraham Lincoln bears a heavy burden of justification, for more words have been written in the English language about America's sixteenth president than any other individual except Jesus Christ. What more could possibly be said on the subject of Abraham Lincoln's life? wonders Brian Dirck

Have you ever found yourself drifting in an oasis of sand? Or crying so hard, but with no one listening to you. Do you get up in a sweat and find yourself in a boat all alone? If you are the happy-go-lucky sort, but very ambitious, then perhaps your hours of sleep will have images of you trying to climb a ladder or scaling a mountain. Have you ever tried to interpret this activity, you perforce indulge in, perhaps every night or every other night? asks B Ashu

Debra Moddelmog is not the first to notice, though, that in his obsession with what we would today refer to as gender Ernest Hemingway's fiction can in fact be profitably and even provocatively reread by feminists, who have been discovering for some time now that Hemingway women are in fact surprisingly resilient and even subversive figures in some of our culture's primary texts of male identity, asserts Terry Caesar

The idea is so simple it seems strange that no one had done this before. Biological knowledge has grown immensely since Darwin wrote his masterpiece and many common objections to his ideas can now be confidently refuted with the help of new information. Another benefit of undertaking this task is that readers who are unfamiliar with the original can now appreciate its basic premise in a book which maintains the framework of the original, but presents up-to-date information in a contemporary style. The book begins with a historical sketch of the progress of opinion on the origin of the species. By giving some historical background Darwin's greatness is brought into focus, affirms Omar Ali