The Burning Mirror is a collection of short stories that mixes the steamy and the spiritual, the subtle, the baroque and the brutal.

This publication would not have been what it is without the help of many institutions and people, which I acknowledge most gratefully. I thank the Central Library and Documentation Center, Iran, and its director, Mr. Iraji Afshar, for permission to publish photo graphs of that part of ms. 392 of the Shrine Library, Meshhed, containing Diocles' treatise. I also thank the authorities of the Shrine Library, and especially Mr. Ahmad GolchTn-Ma'anT, for their cooperation in providing photographs of the manuscript. Mr. GolchTn Ma'anT also sent me, most generously, a copy of his catalogue of the astronomical and mathematical manuscripts of the Shrine Library. I am grateful to the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin, and the Universiteits-Bibliotheek, Leid'en, for providing me with microfilms of manuscripts I wished to consult, and to the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, for granting me access to its manuscripts. The text pages in Arabic script and the Index of Technical Terms were set by a computer-assisted phototypesetting system, using computer programs developed at the University of Washington and a high-speed image-generation phototypesetting device. A continuous stream of text on punched cards was fed through the Katib formatting program, which broke up the text into lines and pages and arranged the section numbers and apparatus on each page. Output from Katib was fed through the compositor program Hattat to create a magnetic tape for use on the VideoComp phototypesetter.

The Burning Glass by Marjorie Bowen is about older woman Julie de Lespinasse who craves solitude and peace, and her charming young suitor, the charming and well-off Monsieur de Guibert. Excerpt: "On a May evening a woman was walking in a delicious garden that was formed out of the little islands on the waters of the Seine, near Paris. There were many people moving about among the lofty elms, Italian poplars and weeping willows that seemed as if untouched by Art..."

Alasdair and Jean are making a deliberate effort to put together a relationship. Leaving Edinburgh to the crowds attending the annual Festival, they move into the caretaker's cottage of an old and spooky castle near Rosslyn Chapel. Rosslyn has been made so famous by The Da Vinci Code that only tour groups are admitted. It's a medieval church where the Holy Grail or the treasure of the Knights Templar is rumored to be hidden. Ferniebank Castle includes a small chapel that's very similar and obviously related to Rosslyn, but is off the beaten path. Or so they think. Even before Jean meets Alasdair at Ferniebank, she hears that trouble is brewing there and in the nearby village of Stanelaw: a local councillor has disappeared, a precious artifact has been stolen, and the castle's former caretaker has died under circumstances that make Alasdair's police-whiskers twitch. It's a bad time for this sort of thing to be happening, since the owner of a popular New Age travel company has just bought the chapel and its healing well, intending to build a spa there, something that will revive the village economy. As though Jean and Alasdair's plans aren't thrown enough of a curve when the New Age guru turns out to be his ex-wife, other crimes and then another death occur right on their doorstep. And everything seems to track back to the former Mrs. Cameron. Even though Alasdair is no longer a formal member of other police force, he and Jean must roll up their sleeves and wade in to yet another mystery. "Authentic dialect...detailed descriptions of the castle and environs, and vivid characters recreate an area rich in history and legend. The tightly woven plot is certain to delight history fans with its dramatic collision of past and present." -- Publishers Weekly "A little romance, a dash of mystery and a soupcon of history make a hearty...dish." -- Kirkus Reviews

Derived from interviews with a wide range of people who experienced or observed New York's 1991 Crown Heights racial riots, Fires In The Mirror is as distinguished a work of commentary on black-white tensions as it is a work of drama. In August 1991 simmering tensions in the racially polarized Brooklyn, New York, neighborhood of Crown Heights exploded into riots after a black boy was killed by a car in a rabbi's motorcade and a Jewish student was slain by blacks in retaliation. Fires in the Mirror is dramatist Anna Deavere Smith's stunning exploration of the events and emotions leading up to and following the Crown Heights conflict. Through her portrayals of more than two dozen Crown eights adversaries, victims, and eyewitnesses, using verbatim excerpts from their observations derived from interviews she conducted, Smith provides a brilliant, Rashoman-like documentary portrait of contemporary ethnic turmoil.

Of all human inventions, the mirror is perhaps the one most closely connected to our own consciousness. As our first technology for contemplation of the self, the mirror is arguably as important an invention as the wheel. Mirror Mirror is the fascinating story of the mirror's invention, refinement, and use in an astonishing range of human activities -- from the fantastic mirrored rooms that wealthy Romans created for their orgies to the mirror's key role in the use and understanding of light. Pendergrast spins tales of the 2,500year mystery of whether Archimedes and his "burning mirror" really set faraway Roman ships on fire; the medieval Venetian glassmakers, who perfected the technique of making large, flat mirrors from clear glass and for whom any attempt to leave their cloistered island was punishable by death; Isaac Newton, whose experiments with sunlight on mirrors once left him blinded for three days; the artist David Hockney, who holds controversial ideas about Renaissance artists and their use of optical devices; and George Ellery Hale, the manic-depressive astronomer and telescope enthusiast who inspired (and gave his name to) the twentieth century's largest ground-based telescope. Like mirrors themselves, Mirror Mirror is a book of endless wonder and fascination.