Pasqualini JR, editor:

Breast Cancer: Prognosis, Treatment, and Prevention, 656 pp, New York, Marcel Dekker, Inc., 2002 ($165.00)..

Pasqualini and colleagues have assembled a significantly unique collection of reviews in breast cancer. In 17 widely ranging chapters, only occasionally overlapping, the authors provide in-depth reviews of the many-faceted hormonal and molecular influences on breast tissue, both normal and malignant.

The authors intend their book to target oncologists, gynecologists, general clinicians, biologists, physiologists, and other advanced students. The majority of the chapters are relatively sophisticated reviews in basic science. Paradoxically, this is why the book may be most useful to clinicians whose available standard texts on breast cancer tend to emphasize reviews of clinical trials. Contrastingly, this text should gain readership from clinicians, particularly those working on the cusp of new patient-focused research, translating new molecular information into patient clinical trials.

The chapter on “BRCA-1, BRCA-2 and Hereditary Breast Cancer,” by Bove et al., is particularly noteworthy; representing one of the most cogent and readable chapters on this issue the reviewer has had the good fortune to read. This chapter, as do many in this text, pushes the reader into regions of basic science that are new, and to fully understand may require some study beyond a cursory reading.

Each of the above-targeted specialists that the authors have identified can benefit from this book. But it would seem clinical researchers, particularly those doing translational research, will find this text most useful in their own endeavors. The book is recommended to those very clinical researchers and should be available in any academic library where such clinical researchers reside.