SOURCE: “The Fascinating Physics of Everyday Complexity, Beautifully Portrayed,” in Physics Today, Vol. 41, No. 2, February, 1988, pp. 79–80.

In the following review, Glazier and Gunaratne offer a positive assessment of Chaos, which they praise as energetic and skillfully written.

About 20 years ago, researchers in a variety of fields, ranging from economics and biology to mathematics and physics, began to question the assumption that complex behavior springs from random and essentially inexplicable causes. Often they were working on unfashionable or interdisciplinary topics and their results were studiously ignored by more mainstream researchers. However, starting about 10 years ago, and largely due to the efforts of mathematicians and theoretical physicists, these disparate groups began to recognize that they were all pursuing fundamentally similar problems describable in terms of the same set of unifying concepts. James Gleick's fascinating book [Chaos] is a history of the development of these ideas, now known generically as chaos...