Bernice Schacter, a Wilmington, Del. freelance, says her book is intended to demystify for a general audience the process of getting prescription drugs from the lab to the drug store. Schacter has over 20 years of biomedical research experience in both academia and industry.

You may find this a good reference book. Designed as a classroom resource, it contains 76 essays grouped in nine categories with references at the end of each essay. The subjects are "the megatrends that are rapidly transforming our health care system."

In 2002, Schmidt circled the Chesapeake in a 22-foot boat for five months and 2,500 miles, retracing Smith's 1608 voyage. Her lecture and book focus on the Bay's ecological history since European Contact and current scientific issues, the Jamestown experience, Native Americans then and now. Creek by creek, the book is a boaters' guide, naturalist's log, and journal of both Smith's adventures and Schmidt's 100-day expedition. The author is a policy scientist and technical editor, captain, naturalist, poet, and educator.

Jennifer Ouellette traces key developments in the field, setting descriptions of the fundamentals of physics in their historical context, as well as against a broad cultural backdrop. For example, Newton's laws as found in the film "Addams Family Values," and the finer points of relativity in "Back to the Future." Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letter" serves to illuminate the mysterious nature of neutrinos, and Jeanette Winterson's novel Gut Symmetries provides an elegant metaphorical framework for string theory.