This festschrift is dedicated to Boris Trakhtenbrot on the occasion of his 85th birthday. It contains a valuable paper by Trakhtenbrot himself, which narrates the work in his thesis (the now-famous theorem of 1950 that validity of first-order logic over finite models is undecidable), his years as a young faculty member at Penza, and then his move to Novosibirsk where he set up a group. Trakhtenbrot mentions that he became interested in the synthesis of automata from monadic logic while translating a 1954 paper by Burks and Wright, also referred to in the papers of Büchi and Elgot. In hindsight, it seems tragic that the Cold War prevented these brilliant mathematicians from meeting.

The volume covers a wide variety of papers on logic and the foundations of theoretical computer science, written by top people in the field. It is certainly worth acquiring for a library.