Lectures on Contemporary Syntactic Theories presents an side-by-side outline of three major syntactic frameworks. Following an initial chapter on syntactic phenomena common to them all, there is a chapter each on Government and Binding, Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar, and Lexical Functional Grammar. This is a great idea for a book, but unfortunately it is rather dated now that Government and Binding has been superseded by the Minimalist Program and GPSG has evolved into HPSG. A final postscript which speculates on the tradeoffs the different frameworks make is written at a high enough level of generality to still be relevant, but overall this book is of mostly historical interest at this point. It would be interesting to see an updated edition.