"The Committee on Affirmative Action and the Status of Women of the Society for [insert organization name here] (a) declares that its primary objective is to render itself obsolete and (b) requests that it be made a permanent, standing committee of the Society, rather than a temporary, ad hoc committee." While such a statement could be issued within any organization, it actually happened twice in the last year within societies to which I belong-one interdisciplinary and one subject-oriented. W

CRC HANDBOOK OF CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS 68th edition. Robert C. Weast, ed. CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL. 1987. 2,464 pp. $69.95. (Price will increase to $74.95 in December.) The CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics has been part of my life since childhood. My father’s copy was pressed into service for a junior high school crystal-growing project and I have been using it ever since. Calcium nitrate is still cubic, colorless and hygroscopic, in case you wondered. Over the years, the handboo

MY DAUGHTER BEATRICE A Personal Memoir of Dr. Beatrice Tinsley, Astronomer. Edward Hill. American Physical Society, New York, 1986. 138 pp., ilIus.$9.95. Beatrice Muriel Hill Tinsley was a wise, warm, and wonderful person. If you knew her in person or through her work, this book from the pen of her father will make you miss her all over again. If you never knew her, you will wish you had. In an astrophysics career that spanned less than 14 years, from her Ph.D. dissertation in 1967 to her dea