Manual of Pediatric Hematology and Oncology

Rating:
Summary: Short of its potential
Review: This book was a major disappointment. It attempts to fill an important niche: that of a concise, up-to-date, single volume overview of pediatric hematology and oncology. I bought the book to have a good review of the field and to take advantage of its many reference tables. Alas, the book suffers from an apparent lack of editing. It is littered with typographical errors, most of which could have been identified with the spell check function on any word processing program. There is little distinction between standard therapies and the author's preferences. The worst feature of the book is its brief discussions of pathogenesis, which are often disorganized and irrelevant to clinical practice (which is the book's focus), and in some cases appear to have been written with little understanding of the field. The section on the pathogenesis of Diamond-Blackfan anemia is a prime example of a collection of unrelated observations that provide no deeper understanding of the disease. In every chapter there are sentences that appear out of context. For example, the section on leukemia lists survival rate as a prognostic factor, as if the survival rate is known at the time of diagnosis. Treatment regimens are sometimes mentioned without any sense of whether they actually work. I will keep this book for its reference tables (though the frequency of errors in the text makes me distrust the tables, too). By eliminating the errors and editing the text carefully, this could be an excellent book.