Book excerpt: Annotation Improved reliability in commercial and military applications requires improved understanding of and predictive models for the time- dependent and nonlinear mechanical behavior of polymeric composites. The May 1998 American Society for Testing and Materials symposium sought to fuse the efforts in this direction of specialists in polymers and composites; these 18 papers are therefore grouped under the subheadings of polymers and composites. Primary polymer topics are chemical and physical aging, nonlinear viscoelasticity, and viscoplasticity. Composites' issues include: the effect of physical aging on time-dependent behavior, multiaxial nonlinear effects, compressive behavior, nonlinear viscoelasticity and viscoplasticity, failure mechanisms, hygrothermal effects, durability, and accelerated strength testing. Schapery is affiliated with the U. of Texas at Austin, and Sun is at Purdue U. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.