R Hoffman E J Benz L E Silberstein H Heslop J Weitz J Anastasi (eds) Elsevier Saunders, Philadelphia, PA, USA, 2013 ISBN: 9781437729283: £232 2480pp
Long gone are the days when a single author, such as Max Wintrobe or James Jandl, could single-handedly write a textbook embracing all that was known of contemporary hematology. Hoffman and co-authors have just published the sixth edition of their valuable textbook. They have recruited more than 300 authors, mostly from the United States, for individual chapters and produced a truly comprehensive compendium. They presumably offer an authoritative narrative on the biology, diagnosis and therapy of a wide range of hematological disorders. I say presumably because it was, forgivably I hope, way beyond my capacity to read the book cover-to-cover. Those few chapters that I did read, on topics close to my heart, were clearly written by experts, some of whom I knew personally, and all were informative and essentially error-free. The cited references, some listed under the heading ‘Suggested Further Reading’, were generally limited to 30, a feature I liked, but the full list was in many cases accessible online for the aficionado. The high quality of the diagrams, all of which seem to have been prepared especially for this book, deserves special commendation.
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