Kerr has published dozens of papers and four books, and he is an inspiration to his colleagues and students, judging from the papers in this collection honoring him, presented in April 2004 at a symposium at the U. of Delaware. Kerr's achievements in mechanical engineering are widely applicable, and this fact is reflected in these surveys of the evolution of the field, with topics such as contact mechanics, crack detection by lasers, buckling modes in continuously supported structures, follower forces and their paradoxes, ice analysis (forces and fracture scaling, and fracture analysis and size effects in the failure of sea ice), concrete pavement analysis, sandwich structures, Green's function in the mechanics of solids and in plane elasticity, mechanical behaviors of carbon nanotubes in hexagonal arrays, and, of course, the engineering of railway tracks. Annotation ©2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)