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New Agricultural Crops . Ed. Gary A. Ritchie Westview Press, Boulder, Col., USA (AAAS Selected Symposium 38) (1979), pp. 259, $US 18.50.

This book is a brave attempt at the difficult task of covering the whole range of tropical fruits for a wide readership at diverse levels of horticultural education. As a consequence of the inherent problems of this approach, the book is a compromise between a planter's handbook and a college student's text-book. The unevenness of treatment is especially evident in the chapters on environmental influences, including soils and fertilizers, on the botany of crops in general, explaining morphology, physiology, breeding, selection and propagation, and on crop husbandry with crop protection. The greater part of the book is devoted to the more important fruits from the commercial standpoint, which is perhaps unfortunate because citrus, bananas and pineapples have each been the subject of separate books in recent years. Most of the minor fruit crops have been neglected in cultivation and experimentation and hence also in the literature. As many of them rate only a short paragraph each in a list of 36 'miscellaneous fruits', this book does little to correct the deficiency, although crops of intermediate status (e.g. mango, avocado and papaya) are adequately covered. The book gives practical advice for anyone about to embark on fruit tree planting, and it is well documented with references to relevant literature for readers requiring further information. Attention is drawn to the uncertainties of profitability in crops that, except for the three major ones cited above, are fraught with storage and marketing problems when produced in greater quantity than the local market can consume. For horticultural/agricultural advisory or training staff in tropical countries where library facilities are meagre or distant this would be a useful compendium of information and reference book.