It has been thirteen years since the first edition, which has always been popular with undergraduate students, was published. Considerable progress has since been made in the field of glacial geology, and it would thus seem timely that this second edition has come out. The book contains a logical progression of topics; an introduction to glacial geology sets the scene quite nicely, especially for first-year students. Individual overview chapters on glacierized regions and key concepts (mass balance and glacier hydrology) precede chapters on processes of glacial erosion, entrainment and deposition. Chapters on deposition are split into terrestrial and subaqueous environments. The book is richly illustrated with photographs and diagrams in full colour. An approach that will make this a popular textbook for revision with undergraduates, especially those starting out on the subject or those wanting information at-a-glance, is the use of boxes within the main text. These boxes are self-contained case studies or relevant additional information that would have interrupted the flow of the main text too much. For example, there are useful boxes with brief descriptions of the basics and the use of numerical dating techniques such as optically-stimulated luminescence and cosmogenic nuclide surface exposure dating, but also case studies on direct observations of subglacial processes such as quarrying or sediment deformation. The text is written in an easily-accessible style and contains between one and three pages of references to some key papers, arranged as separate bibliographies after each chapter, which again would help a targeted reading and revision style.

There are, however, a few negative points from both a lecturer’s, but also student's perspective. Firstly, the focus of this book is somewhat selective: some new sections, for example on palaeoglaciology, are focused on only one aspect of that field, in this case ice sheet reconstruction. Glacier and palaeoclimate reconstruction is surprisingly omitted, despite the rapid development of these fields in the last c. 15–20 years. Secondly, the book rarely provides clear and up-to-date definitions: the different types of glaciers (e.g. cirque, valley, ice cap etc.) are not introduced with clear conceptual diagrams and photographs, but are covered in a section on global glacier distribution (chapter 2); a case-study approach attempts to introduce fairly complex relationships between altitude, latitude and climate fairly early on to explain this distribution, but this does not seem to work too well. In other cases, for example the section on direct glacial sedimentation (8.1) or the ice-marginal moraine section (9.1), the authors introduce rather ambivalent and/or perpetuate dated terms (e.g. lodgement till, supraglacial till, glaciotectonic moraines), which are not usually used in the literature and thus bound to lead to confusion amongst undergraduates when matching this to the current literature.

Those criticisms aside, the book is written in an accessible manner and well-illustrated; undergraduate students will thus embrace it as a first resource, but my impression is that this book may not be used quite so much beyond introductory modules.