Book excerpt: This book, based on lectures given at the Accademia dei Lincei, is an accessible and leisurely account of systems that display a chaotic time evolution. This behaviour, though deterministic, has features more characteristic of stochastic systems. The analysis here is based on a statistical technique known as time series analysis and so avoids complex mathematics, yet provides a good understanding of the fundamentals. Professor Ruelle is one of the world's authorities on chaos and dynamical systems and his account here will be welcomed by scientists in physics, engineering, biology, chemistry and economics who encounter nonlinear systems in their research.