This book is neatly summarized in the Wikipedia entry on the author at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Prigogine and I can do no better. The man himself is a Nobel prize winner - in (physical) chemistry, 1977, for work related to this book (see the press release from the Royal Swedish Academy of Science at http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1977/press.html). All I have to offer is a reaction to the presentation: it's excellent (perhaps thanks to Isabelle Stengers), but you do need some technical sophistication. It's at the perfect level for someone like me who got through junior year physics and then escaped to math. It filled some conceptual gaps and showed me others that escaped my attention 50 years ago when I was struggling with quantum theory. To do that successfully requires that all three languages - symbols, diagrams and words - be deployed with skill.