Ah, a Mir book, what a nostalgia trip. A friend of mine gave me a physical-chemistry lab textbook (translated to Spanish) and it has been the best scientific undergraduate lab book I have ever used (as student and lab teacher). Very nice experiments and explanations. The only con is that, as with many soviet things at the time, they barely gave any recognition to the western european scientific legacy, so almost any principle you associate with a western European name(Boyles Law, Avogadro Number, etc) was named after a soviet scientist who supposedly discovered it first. To be honest I never bothered to research about how valid were those claims.