REFERENCE

The first edition of this book was edited by Remi Nader and Abdulrahman J. Sabbagh. It was published by Thieme Medical Publishers, Inc. (New York) in 2009. This soft cover edition on A4 format consists of circa 462 pages content, and a list of abbreviations plus the index at the end.

CONTENT

Seems to cover a broad spectrum of cases in neurosurgical topics that are relevant to be studied. Cases have a good explanation, which broadens the context. Sometimes even schematic drawings are provided in the answers for a better understanding (made by the second author). The layout is rather neat, and the book offers a fresh modern look and is comfortable to handle given its size. After a short while, the book turns out to have one major drawback: the solution of the case presentation is often offered in the title of the correponding chapter! Further, if the case is presented on the left page, answers can already be seen on the right page, which I found both distracting and sometimes demotivating.

DISCUSSION

The concept of the book is well presented, but it turned out that revealing in advance (the chapter's title) what the case is all about was such a huge demotivating factor that I hardly used it. It might have been a different situation if the book was all about surgical treatment, but there is a decision-making part in neurosurgery that the book is trying to teach us, but actually does not. My suggestion would be to change the case titles in such a way that the reader has to do the thinking from the beginning. For the sake of indexing, there might be a second index at the back of the book that connects a topic with a chapter, for easy review.

The book would also benefit from the standard “question–answer” layout that shows the questions on the right page, meaning the reader has to turn the page to read the answers (and cannot do so accidentally). I realize it may take a little bit more of paper, but this is my preference for a book that is supposed to stimulate my thinking. An overview of positive aspects and suggestions for improvement for this book can be found in Table 1 .

Table 1

Overview of positive aspects and suggestions for improvement

CONCLUSION

Four-star content, but presentation issues reduce the end-score to three stars.