BOOK REVIEWS 609

light would be 100 ångstroms’) via a fairly technical description of the telescopeand its ancillary instrumentation to dealings with notions such as the Hubble con-stant, baryons and�0.

SRON Laboratory for Space Research, CORNELIS DEJAGER

Utrecht, The Netherlands

Stuart Ross Taylor,Destiny or Chance; our Solar System and its Place in theCosmos, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 229 pp., 1998, hardback GB£17.95/US $24.95, ISBN 0-521-4817-8.

A clear account, addressing a broad audience, describing the properties of the solarsystem and discussing the ways it, as well as other planetary systems, could havebeen formed. This booklet is a little jewel, with stimulating ideas, worth to be readand being reflected upon in quietness. I was pleased with the defence of scienceand scientific thinking in the last chapter, but after all, the whole of the book is aprecious little monument for science.

SRON Laboratory for Space Research, CORNELIS DEJAGER

Utrecht, The Netherlands

Yoshiaki Sofue (ed.),The Central Regions of the Galaxy and Galaxies, IAU Sym-posium 184, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, The Netherlands, 521 pp.,1998, hardbound Dfl. 360,00/US $195.00/GB £123.00, ISBN 0-7923-5060-X,paperback Dfl. 95,00/US $105.00/GB £67.00, ISBN 0-7923-5061-8.

Galactic centres are exciting as well as excited places. Their study is pushing atthe limits of technology, with high spatial resolution and wide wavelength cov-erage essential for progress. This conference volume follows the traditional IAUSymposium format, with long articles reviewing progress, and 2-page original con-tributions. Most of the short papers are too short to convey much. A few howeverfascinate: the story by Miyoshi of the near-discovery of the megamaser evidencefor a massive black hole in NGC4258 in 1992, 3 years before its actual discovery,illustrates just how close to the limits of technology, and available efforts, are majordiscoveries. Sakamoto et al. present elegant results showing that dense nuclearconcentrations of molecular gas are common. Importantly, most of their galaxiesshow no AGN activity – why are their central black holes so black, or do they notexist? Also, galactic bars seem unrelated to central gas mass: there is apparentlysomething seriously wrong with our understanding of nuclear gas flows, and the