This is a hefty two-volume book with distinguished contributors and an ambitious scope. The first volume deals with basic introductory material about plant abiotic response, in seven chapters, and methods to improve plant responses to stress, in 20 chapters. The 27 chapters in volume 2, the larger of the two volumes, comprise case studies in specific crops. The book aspires to cover all abiotic stresses, and mostly does so, with chapters about temperature, water, salinity, toxicity, and in the cases studied usually subsections on several or most of these. It is generally very well written, sometimes beautifully so, and it should be a useful source for ideas, giving readers the opportunity to get near to the bottom of current progress on whatever crop they wish to know about. However, as far as I can find, the editors have not stated their target audience (although the distinguished author of Forward to volume 1 gave his view, which seemed right). I think researchers will find plenty of useful reading here, whether they are working on fundamental or applied problems. On the other hand, it also seems to be at a level accessible to students.

However, no book can serve all purposes, and this also has some downsides. A book with this structure and content is in danger of frequent overlaps. There seems to have been an effort to keep this under control so that if you find similar subsection headings in different chapters, the details they contain do differ. In one instance, though, two whole chapters seemed to be more closely related than one would expect. There is no doubt that many chapters are just right: enough introduction, but not too much, gets to the interesting points quickly, a clear focus, presented with a hint of excitement as well as commitment. But some have excessive introductory material, presumably because many case-study chapters cover the same general areas to introduce the main stress problems. This partly explains the size of the book, but the result is also a revelation of some authors' limitations in understanding background points that, I presume, do not happen to be a part of their own involvement in the field. I tested this in one area where I was confident of my understanding, and was not happy that sometimes old misunderstandings were repeated.

In practice, my critical concerns may matter little to researchers; few will read the book from start to end; probably they will dip into the book in search of chapters on particular topics; and they will use other sources as well. I found that using the book as a source to plunder information worked well, where the wide scope of the book was clearly advantageous. Students, though, might find fragmentation of some information a problem. However, the collection of case studies occupying volume 2 is unusually large and potentially the most considerable benefit of the book to researchers, teachers or students.