This book has eight main chapters, covering the history and development of the rubber industry, plant structure and ecophysiology, latex production, genetics and breeding, tissue culture, biotechnology and molecular biology, agronomy and nutrition, and environmental and biological constraints. There are also short chapters on honey and timber from rubber, and on rubber and the Clean Development Mechanism. The author set out to produce a replacement for the comprehensive work described by Webster and Baulkwill in their book Rubber (Longman, UK 1989), and this new book is certainly more up-to-date, with over 300 references later than 1989. Breeding, tissue culture and molecular biology are well handled, and there is a useful section on adaptation of clones to marginal conditions. However, some of the other chapters are poor, badly organised and repetitive, while some sections have been copied verbatim, without acknowledgement, from Webster and Baulkwill (but with occasional errors; for example, relative growth rate in units of g. wk⁻¹, where the original has, correctly, g. g⁻¹. wk⁻¹). Tapping system notation is described, but the reasons for choosing different systems are hardly discussed, and coverage of yield stimulation and micro-tapping is cursory. The section on biological constraints covers leaf diseases, with a good discussion on South American leaf blight, but there is no mention of the various root, stem and tapping panel diseases that affect rubber. Overall, the book is a useful contribution, but for a complete view of the crop, the reader will still need Webster and Baulkwill's book.