A tuba player without a tuba and his jellyfish-imitating sister cope with their father's disappearance in a middle-grade novel both hilarious and moving by Mary Winn Heider, the author of The Mortification of Fovea Munson. Now in paperback! When Lenny Volpe, former quarterback of the worst professional football team in the nation, leaves his family and disappears, the Chicago Horribles win their first game in a long time. Fans are thrilled. The world seems to go back to normal. Except for the Volpe kids. Winston throws himself into playing the tuba, and Louise starts secret experiments to find a cure for brain injuries, and they're each fine, just fine, coping in their own way. That is, until the investigation of some eccentric teacher behavior and the discovery of a real live bear paraded as the Horribles' new mascot make it clear that things are very much Not Fine. The siblings may just need each other, after all.

The investigation of the Galactic nucleus and its surroundings is necessarily a modem endeavor, for traditional observations made at visual wavelengths have not even begun to penetrate the veil of -30 magnitudes of visual extinction that intercedes. On the other hand, infrared, and especially radio observers find a relatively unobstructed view of the central portion of the Galaxy, so the study of this arena has proceeded apace with the development of these branches of astronomy. Thus, it is no accident that the first IAU sponsored conference to be held on the Galactic center is timed to coincide with the initiation, or the immediate aftennath, of major technical developments at long wavelengths, including infrared array detectors, millimeter-wavelength aperture synthesis, and self-calibration and refmed deconvolution algorithms in aperture synthesis radio astronomy. The center of the Galaxy is also accessible to X and gamma-ray observers, and progress at high energies has been steady, especially as imaging capabilities are being realized at X-ray wavelengths. However, one might expect that the revolution in the high energy domain is still ahead of us, as instruments with larger collecting areas and improved spatial resolution are now being developed. The youth of this subject is evidenced by the relatively small number of meetings that have been devoted to it.

Proceedings of the August 1997 symposium. One hundred and ninety- four contributions present comparative studies on the data of the Milky Way and central regions of nearby galaxies. Included is information on galactic bulges, galactic center star clusters, star formation, starbursts, neutral ISM in the galactic center, molecular gas in the nuclei of galaxies, gas dynamics in the galactic center, the central parsecs of the milky way, magnetic and high-energy phenomena, black holes in galaxies, black hole in the galactic center, and black hole powering of AGN and jets. A sampling of topics: diffraction-limited IR speckle masking observations of the central regions of Seyfert galaxies, the stellar content of the Quintuplet cluster, and the structural characteristics of spiral bulges. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Could Einstein have possibly anticipated directly testing the most captivating prediction of general relativity, that there exist isolated pockets of spacetime shielded completely from our own? Now, almost a century after that theory emerged, one of the world's leading astrophysicists presents a wealth of recent evidence that just such an entity, with a mass of about three million suns, is indeed lurking at the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way--in the form of a supermassive ''black hole''! With this superbly illustrated, elegantly written, nontechnical account of the most enigmatic astronomical object yet observed, Fulvio Melia captures all the excitement of the growing realization that we are on the verge of actually seeing this exotic object within the next few years. Melia traces our intellectual pilgrimage to the ''brooding behemoth'' at the heart of the Milky Way. He describes the dizzying technological advances that have recently brought us to the point of seeing through all the cosmic dust to a dark spot in a clouded cluster of stars in the constellation Sagittarius. Carefully assembling the compelling circumstantial evidence for its black hole status, he shows that it is primed to reveal itself as a glorious panorama of activity within this decade--through revolutionary images of its ''event horizon'' against the bright backdrop of nearby, radiating gas. Uniquely, this book brings together a specific and fascinating astronomical subject--black holes--with a top researcher to provide both amateur and armchair astronomers, but also professional scientists seeking a concise overview of the topic, a real sense of the palpable thrill in the scientific community when an important discovery is imminent.

Our Galactic center's proximity allows astronomers to study physical pro cesses within galactic nuclei at a level of detail that will never be possible in the more distant, but usually also more spectacular, extragalactic systems. Recent advances in instrumentation from the radio, through the submillime ter and infrared wavebands, and out to the X- and "'(-ray bands now allow observations of the Galactic Center over thirteen orders of magnitude in wave length. Our knowledge about the central few hundred parsecs of our Galaxy has consequently increased vastly over the past decade. The same new instru ments provide high resolution, high quality measurements of nearby ''normal'' galactic nuclei; that is, nuclei whose modest energy output is comparable to that of our own (and most other) galaxies. Theorists, spurred in part by the new observations, have been able to refine models of the energetics, dynam ics, and evolution of the gas and stellar systems deep within galactic nuclei.