Modern Day Yankee

Alan Lightman. Penguin Books, $6.95 (183pp) ISBN 978-0-14-009476-3

Lightman, a physicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and a teacher at Harvard, has a flair for explaining the issues and difficult problems of modern astrophyics today. PW was particularly pleased by his ""personal sidelights.'' (February)

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