and present conditions by Worsley, Warren and Ballantyne. The first of these usefully points out the problems of establishing a permafrost stratigraphy in Britain where the absence of a continuous sequence spanning both the Ipswi- chian and the Hoxnian hampers progress. The rest of the section carries some eighteen papers organised into groups entitled "weathering and soils", "permafrost and ground ice" and "slopes, sediments and masswasting". The paper by Connell and Hall which examines the perigla- cial history of "moraineless" Buchan in the North-east of Scotland, I found particularly useful. Inevitably others have found partial homes elsewhere, such as the paper on rock platform erosion in Norway by Dawson et al. The paper itself might have been more com- fortable in the modern analogues section but nevertheless it outlines useful ideas on the un- derresearched area of frost action at the rear of fresh and salt-water shore platforms. The use of an analogue approach is useful but its inclusion in the form of six plus one papers makes the title of this volume slightly mislead- ing. Having said this, the book is very well il- lustrated and indexed and since each paper car- ries its own references, it is a very good source of up to date information on the Periglacial of Britain and Ireland John Boardman has done a good job in putting this book together. JIM HANSOM (Sheffield) Catastrophic Flooding. L. Mayer and D. Nash (Editors). The Binghamton Symposia in Geomorphology: International Series, no. 18, Allen and Unwin, London, 1987, xiv+ 410 pp., £35.00 (hardback) Catastrophic Flooding follows in the foot- steps of its seventeen predecessors in the "Binghamton Geomorphology Symposia" as a very useful topical collection of papers in geo- morphology. Fluvial geomorphologists with in- terests in the hydraulics, sedimentology, geo- morphic effects, and frequency of large 93 magnitude floods will find numerous good ar- ticles in this volume. Since the seminal paper on magnitude and frequency of fluvial proceses by Wolman and Miller in 1960, considerable re- search has focused on determining the geo- morphic work and geomorphic effectiveness of catastrophic floods. This research continues in this volume with well-documented discussions of the geomorphic effects of large floods in var- ious environments. The effects of arid and semi- arid region floods are treated in chapters by Schick and Lekach (Sinai Desert), Brookes (Iran), Webb (Colorado Plateau), and Oster- kamp and Costa (Colorado). In addition to noting the extreme changes associated with these floods, several of the authors provide use- ful observations upon the recovery processes and rates in these settings. Clark and others summarize the effects of a major flood in the central Appalachians in 1985 and its implica- tion to Holocene floodplain development. Ex- tensive erosion and aggradation during this flood reorganized entire floodplains in many reaches they studied in West Virginia and Virginia. A particularly interesting approach to as- sessing geomorphic effectiveness is presented in Chapter 1 by Baker and Costa using the con- cepts of shear stress and stream power per unit boundary area in an attempt to quantify flood effectiveness. They link geomorphic effective- ness of floods to stress and power during floods instead of their magnitude and frequency. Baker and Costa compare shear stress and stream power per unit of stream bed in alluvial and bedrock rivers to demonstrate important dif- ferences in their respective responses to cata- strophic flood discharges. They also note that basins differ considerably in their ability to generate shear stress and stream power, but show that maximum values tend to occur in basins with areas between 10 and 50 km 2. This paper emphasizes the importance of quantify- ing our approach in developing models for pre- dicting geomorphic changes during floods and shows that flood power is clearly related to ef-