'erbert Simon is an academic with a very distinguished reputation in several .fields, and a winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1978. He has contributed greatly to economics, management science and artificial intelligence, and most Computersand Society readers will have encountered his work in at least one of these fields. This book is an account of his life, his research and his views from birth in 1916 up to the 1990s. The book itself is presented in four parts. The first takes the reader from Simon's birth in Wisconsin and his boyhood there through to his university education in the University of Chicago. Writing at a considerable distance from his subject, he calls himself "the boy" for the first chapter, a device which I found disconcerting in an autobiography. Simon discusses his relationship with his father, the academic and political surrounding of Chicago and meeting his wife, Dorothea. The second, and longest, part covers Simon's early career as a researcher. He was a staff member with the International City Manager's Association, director of Administrative Measurement Studies in Berkeley and as a lecturer in Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. The description of the trouble he had getting a security clearance for his RAND work (as he had had socialist affiliations while a student) gives a clear taste of the time (the late 1940s). Simon then moved to the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University), where he was part of the team that built the Graduate School of Industrial Administration. Simon also casts a gently observing eye over the politics of academic research and explains some of his theories of decision making. Computers and Society will perhaps be most interested in his description of early artificial intelligence research at RAND, where Simon tried to create machines that could thinb--his account of correspondance with Bertrand Russell concerning a computer program that could arrive at the proofs in "Principia Mathematica" is delightful. In the third part, "View from the Mountain", Simon delves deeper in the questions raised by artificial intelligence research and the light they shed on human thought processes. He also gives some insight into his personal life (including a frank account of a love affair), his hobbies and recreations, and his argumentative nature. The account of his academic career continues with the establishment of computer science programmes, the troubled times that were the Sixties, his election to the President's Science Advisory Committee and his foreign travels. Simons here presents us with his "Travel Theorem", which states that "Anything that can be learned by a normal American adult on a trip to a foreign country (of less that one year's duration) can be learned more quickly, cheaply, and easily by visiting the San Diego Public Library". The final part deals with his Nobel Prize (his account of the political manouvering behind the award are quite illuminating), his continued AI research and his travels to China (including a trip at the time of the Tianamen Square massacre) and the Soviet Union. Simon leaves us with chapters on his personal philosophies and on "The Scientist as Problem Solver". This is a gentle, pleasant and interesting book. Although much of it deals dispassionately with the career of a scholar, Simon is not afraid to give us glimpses of his personal feelings and emotions when they are relevant. For those interested in his life and times, or in the early years of management science and artificial intelligence, it is a recommended read. H Models of my Life by Herbert Simon. MIT Press, 1996. ISBN 026269185X Reviewed by: Rdndn Kennedy ronank@acm.org Computers and Society, December 1998

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