American Architecture Now by Barbaralee Diamonstein (review)

332 Books entertainment. Is a superficial approach obligatory for mass readership? However, I feel that this book does successfully convey the fascination, if not the understanding, of holography to the casual reader. It should have wide appeal. The Laser Experimenter's Handbook. Frank G. McAleese. Tab Books, Blue Ridge Summit, Penn., 1979. 210 pp.. illus. $9.95. ISBN: 0-83061123 -1. Reviewed by Z. Knittl' This is an enthusiast-type book, trying to embrace the theoretical principles as well as the practical know-how underlying the craft of laser building. In the first four chapters the author takes up the task of initiating the supposedly layman reader into the basic concepts of modern physics related to the subject matter (atomic structure, quanta, waves, geometrical optics). Given the audience and the space available, this is a difficult task even for an experienced physicist. It proved to be thin ice for the author and much cracking and splashing was heard by your reviewer on the first 60 pages or so. Besides causing confusion in several places, the presentation shows imbalance, e.g. it is not clear why the author, after having challenged the most intricate basics, goes on tiptoe round the classical refraction law. With some tolerance on detail and physics terminology, much more useful information will be gathered in Chapters 5 and 6 on the actual laser and maser concepts, accompanied by many photographs of real laser systems and their applications by renowned US. firms and laboratories. After due safety warnings in Chapter 7, the book culminates in the extensive Chapter 8, where six different laser projects are presented: two versions of the gallium arsenide red lasers (differing in pulse rate), based on commercially available RCA hardware. Then there is the basic helium-neon laser with the know-how compressed into two incompletely documented drawings of optical and electrical layout and a half page of text. This superdigest can hardly be justified by reference made to a commercially available laser tube system. Much more care is devoted to the description of the CO, laser, but the next item, the ruby rod laser, is also treated scantily. Its doubly wrong wavelength (6328 nm, instead of 694.3 nm, the former figure relating to the He-Ne laser, if read in angstroms) is one example of the many oversights dispersed in the book's text, formulas and figures. Project 6 is the author's original and verified assembly for a general use gas laser with a system of supply bottles and valves to enable experimenting with various lasing mixtures. All the projects are accompanied by drawings of principal layout and by electrical schemes of the corresponding power supplies and triggering circuits, with lists of parts and purchasing advice in the U.S.A. The projects may supply useful ideas for an experienced laboratory man (and there is no doubt that all of them had worked in the author's own hands), but they will hardly initiate the kind of reader that had been preconceived in the Preface and by the style of the introductory chapters. Chapter 10, on the present and future applications of lasers, presents a handful of photographs (and a rather peculiar look at what is and is not holography). The book concludes with some further data on recent solid state laser materials, with physical tables pertinent to lasers and a glossary of terms. Chapter 9, on phasors, is completely out of phase with the flow chart of the book. To summarize: this is an attempt to tell, in a highly communicative style, how to produce laser light, and, to a minor degree, how to use it in applications. The book may satisfy an accomplished do-it-yourself enthusiast of the electronics type, not bent on the physical subleties of the subject matter. No space is devoted to the optical process of guiding, expanding and modulating laser light, such as might be of interest for the artist-engineer and designer. After all, it wants to be, and it is, a laser builder's primer. The Artist and the Built Environment. Donald Stoltenberg. Davis Publ., Worcester, Mass.. 1980. 150 pp.. illus. ISBN: 0-87192-1 18-9. Reviewed by Art Brenner** The...