The flexible family of distributions has been used extensively in statistical theory and practice for over a century, but a broad detailed reference to it has not been produced until now. Specialists from North America, Europe, and Australia synthesize all the information available in the literature that they feel is worth passing on, striving to attain a proper balance between theory and applications, into a handbook they intend to be accessible to novices and useful for veteran researchers. Among their topics are generalizations and related univariate distributions, beta distributions in stochastic processes, Bayesian inference, and limited-range distributions with information dropout. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)