Book reviews

It is a mark of the success of a national community when there is convenient leisure time for non-academic writers and non-government scribes to enhance the quality of its national community existence by writing about the community’s people and events. One such national community, a nation within a larger nation state, is Chinese Canada. As Benedict Anderson in his Imagined Communities (1991) surmised: a “nation is an imagined political community– and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” (6). Chinese Canada is not a nation state as it lacks a formal government, foreign policy, and thus a military presence. But it is a nation because it has a critical mass of 1.3 million people that began to rise with the influx of Chinese refugees from Vietnam in 1979. Chinese Canadians now live mainly in Vancouver and Toronto. It has wealth in the personage of Li Ka-shing who became the first Chinese entrepreneur on a global scale when he bought controlling interest of Hutchison Whampoa in 1979. He and his sons, Victor and Richard, along with Michael Lee-Chin, Caleb Chan, the Louie family and others are the economic elites of Chinese Canada. Chinese Canada has a strong political sense of self as a result of the

good laboratory practice has placed a demand on quality-control procedures. This book, written from practical experience, allows any laboratory, with just the addition of an IBM PC, to introduce good quality-control procedures. The necessary software is available from the publisher on disk. The first edition was extremely well received; to meet new demands in legislation a chapter has been added to the second edition to deal with external quality-control schemes. More attention has also been given to identifying the trends in qualitycontrol data. Specifically, the autoregressive moving average model to identify trends is introduced in this text. The book provides the user with all that is required and identifies possible errors introduced by computational errors in the PC. The user does not have to be frightened by statistical approaches and can adequately deal with the quality assurance problems of analytical chemistry without passing them on to an external statistician.
The book includes 70 references and identifies other areas of suitable reading. It is attractively produced with the distinctive cover styles of the Ellis Horwood publishing house. An extremely valuable addition to the analytical chemistry laboratory and good value at 29.95.
On-Line Coupled LC-LG By KONRAD GROB (Hiithig Buch Verlag GmbH, Heidelberg, Germany, 1991). 462 pp. DM 178. ISBN 3-7785-1872-0. This manual, which is part of a series on chromatographic methods, concentrates on the techniques for transferring the usually large volumes of LC eluent to GC. Selective solvent evaporation at a sufficiently high rate is at the heart of the transfer. The LC-GC interfaces required for the different transfer techniques are described in detail, followed by a discussion of applications in order to show the practical implications.
The book is based on an inductive approach. After a presentation of partial transfer from LC to GC (Section 2), considered to be of limited interest, Section 3 describes the basic concepts that it should be simple to rebuild the systems. Section 6, on LC techniques suitable for LC-GC, shows how much is left to be done in this field. Sections 7 and 9 describe the presently used transfer techniques (retention gap techniques, concurrent eluent evaporation), while Sections 8 and 10 discuss applications involving the corresponding transfer methodsthey should illustrate theory through practice. Section 11 gives some comments on the idea of using liquefied gases on supercritical fluids for sample preparation instead of ordinary LC eluents.
As coupled techniques receive more attention a basic reference text like this forms an ideal foundation for the researcher.

International Symposium on Laboratory Automation and Robotics
The ninth International Symposium on Laboratory Automation and Robotics will be held from 20 to 23 October 1991 at the Boston Park Plaza Hotel and Towers. Using the theme, 'Laboratory Automation Fad of the 1980s or Necessity of the 1990s', this year's Symposium will focus on recent developments that provide state-of-the-art automation for today's chemists.
Two keynote speakers from the pharmaceutical industry will be featured in the opening session on Monday morning. David B. Weinstein, Director of the Lipid and Lipoprotein Metabolism Department at Sandoz Research Institute will speak on 'Jumping into the twentieth century before it's too late: is laboratory robotics still in its infancy?' Bernd C. Schade, Director of Quality Assurance for the Consumer Healthcare Division of Miles Inc., will discuss 'Quality control in the year 2000'. Additionally, several laboratory managers will provide their perspective on implementing laboratory automation.
The three-day programme will include over 75 podium and poster presentations describing laboratory robotics and laboratory workstation procedures from pharmaceutical, biotechnology, environmental, industrial hygiene, and chemical/petrochemical laboratories. The Symposium's technical presentations and informal discussions provide an excellent opportunity for laboratory automation users and novices to exchange ideas and applications experience. Session