J. F. de la Teja is the greatest living historian of San Antonio. Here, he puts its history, its people, its institutions, its acequias and how they blend together in a single source. This book covers the early [Spanish] period of the city, and provides the opportunity to see the early settlement, to imagine the lives of those who began a new life here on the far northern reaches of New Spain, back in the early eighteenth century.

It is a "must have" book for anyone interested in San Antonio's early days: an outstanding resource for the student of Texas history.

America's current social movements can't be explained without this man's fight.

In the frame of Frontier Science Research Conferences-F S R C the meeting entitled "Luminescent Materials-2002" took place in La Jolla, California and was organized by La Jolla International School of Science and The Institute for Advanced Physics Studies, divisions of the Stefan University. About twenty presentations from different countries covered practically all hot areas of the modern luminescence.

The advantages of material science and fundamental physics were demonstrated by various techniques and with different organic, inorganic and hybrid substances. Some theoretical approaches were demonstrated in connection with luminescent properties of systems.

Few reports in the book (Dr.E.Antic-Fidancev, Dr.P.Dorenbos, Dr.A.Florez , Dr.D.Jaque and Dr.Morita) were devoted by high luminescent materials based on lanthanides. The new developments in Ln3+ doped laser give a possibility to spread the range of laser application from the UV to the IR. Absorption/emission lines of an isostructural family exhibit a linear relation with ionic radii of the Ln3+ ions along the lanthanide series. On the basis of the evolution of Stark components of some crystal field levels the phase existence limit is demonstrated. The preparation and photoluminescence of rare earth complexes embedded in xerogel

Participants of the Conference paid a strong attention to inorganic nanostructures (Dr. L.Carlos, Dr.A.Ivanov, Dr.K.Hino) as well as organic ones (Dr.P.Reineker, Dr.A.Vitukhnovsky). There is growing interest in the full color emitting materials that combine good mechanical, thermal and chemical stability in air with high room temperature emission quantum yield. From this aspect, the main interest of the organic/inorganic hybrid concept basically derives from possibility of tailoring the properties of novel multifunctional advanced materials through the combination at the nanosize level of the organic and inorganic components in a single material. Review of resent results on the emission properties of stable sol-gel derived nanohybrids and lanthanide-based di-uresil nanocomposites is presented. The excellent report about theory of the quantum dots interfaces and quasi-two dimensional optics of the semiconductor nanostructures was done by Dr.A.Ivanov.

The non-adiabatic treatment of optical properties of quantum dots proposed in Devreese's presentation to provide an explanation for remarkably high intensity of phonon satellities observed in the photoluminescence and Raman spectra of quantum-dot structures. Minami et al present the experimental result showing that the spectral width of optical transitions, especially of exciton transition, is narrow enough in GaAs quantum dots, because of the phonon bottleneck effect, and the coherence created by laser light maintains ~ 1ns. Quantum interference between continua and a discrete level embedded in the former gives rise to a pronounced asymmetric spectral profile having a peak-and-dip structure know as a Fano resonance. This phenomenon is investigated by Dr.Hino. The new theoretical approaches show generation of quite rich fine-structures of Fano resonance states ascribable to VB mixing as well as Coulomb coupling.

Two presentations are connected with organic nanoobjects - dendrimers. Dendrimers are new class of engineered macromolecules showing a branching pattern on a nanometer scale. Reineker with coauthors focused on optical absorption and energy transfer of dendrimers taking into account vibrational degrees of freedom. They applied the Frenkel exciton model and describe the dephasing according to Haken, Strobl and Reineker theory to the three lowest dendrimer D4, D10 and D22. Vitukhnovsky gave the description of experimental results for exciton relaxation in J-aggregates of thiacarbocyanine dyes (THIATS and TDC) and energy transfer from multiple the dendrimer peripheries to lanthanide ions used as dendrimer core.

Some other aspects of luminescent materials were represented on Conference: new materials for medical applications, doped insulators and electron processes inside them, application of surface plasmon excitation of photofunctional molecules on gold surface and many others topics.

We believe that this type of meetings are fruitful and have some advantages against traditional conferences.

This book was written prior to the opening of the paved highway from the U.S. to La Paz and Cabo San Lucas. It is heavily illustrated with wonderful color pictures of such places a Mulege, San Felipe, and many other villages on the Sea of Cortez and the Pacific Coast of Baja, as well as maps and much information. It is not up-to-date, but is nevertheless an inspiring read, printed on high-quality glossy paper.

For anyone with an interest in this area, I recommend it highly.

Joseph (Joe) Pierre

author of Handguns and Freedom...Their Care and Maintenance
and other books