Book excerpt: "A reader's first impression on leafing through this book is of the large number of graphs and diagrams, used to illustrate shapes of distributions...and to show real data examples in various ways. A closer reading reveals a nice mix of theory and applications, with the copious graphical illustrations alluded to. Such a mixture is of course dear to the heart of the applied probabilist/statistician, and should impress even the most ardent theorists." --MATHEMATICAL REVIEWS