As a soil text book by a professor of soil science this is an excellent reference book which should be read with pen and notebook in hand.

It is a harder read than need be, owing to very small print and the unbelievably poor quality of illustrations, particularly the photographs. The diagram of ‘an arbuscular mycorrhizal fungus’ is an illustration in point. You can eventually work out what the illustration is, but it is not readily apparent. The photocopy illustrating terraces in Friuli, figure 2.11, loses an opportunity to lift the spirit of a flagging reader: Friuli (in Northern Italy) might just as well be Huddersfield. If Friuli looks like Huddersfield, then what hope does the reader have in gaining any insight from photographs of smaller items? An example, figure 2.7, says that it ‘shows the effect of compaction’, but it just doesn't. Figure 4.6 could be the moon and, like the picture of ‘Mushroom fungi growing in a litter layer’, is of such poor quality that it would be better omitted altogether. The reader deserves fewer and better photographs, and so does the author. However, it is an excellent reference book to which I, as the co-owner of a vineyard in Cornwall, will continually refer.