Any one working on the medicinal plants of Latin America and wanting to gain an insight into what research has been undertaken on a particular species will find this book essential reading. As with all the books produced by James Duke it is informative and provides a wealth of basic information.

It covers about 500 of the estimated 90 000 species of medicinal plants used in Latin America. The author presents the data in a very rigid format that assists data mining but does not make for light reading! The power of this book is in the electronic version where the data are searchable, and it is easy to link many of the references to their sources such as PubMed. For each of the 500 species the authors provide its accepted Latin bionomial scientific name, authority, family synonyms and common names, along with a code that relates to the safety of the species relative to coffee. An ‘X’ means do not take it, whereas a ‘+++’ means it is probably safer than coffee, a claim given to papaya, a species with a wide range of uses including as a contraceptive, for treating diabetes and for the control of nematodes. Each species has a section on activities using key words linked to references. I found this list very comprehensive and congratulate the authors. Information about dosages is also provided with a scoring system to evaluate safety: a species scoring ‘X’ indicates the species is not considered as a food, whereas a ‘+++’ indicates the species is sold as a food in many US supermarkets. I presume there will be some overlap in the two scoring systems! Sections on ‘downsides’ cover contra-indications, interactions and side effects. The final section is about the activity of extracts and in some cases comments are made about the chemistry of a species.