The book is timely given increasing demand for olive products in response to claimed health benefits. It contains a vast amount of authoritative information presented in 31 chapters (not 26 as stated in CABI's new book information) covering many but not all aspects of olives and their cultivation, processing and consumption. There are 36 black and white pictures, which help in understanding the text. The bibliography is large, taking up 42 pages, and there are suggestions for further reading or websites at the ends of some chapters. The book is written from an academic perspective, and with passion for the crop and product. Ioannis Therios is to be congratulated on writing well in English, but sympathetic copy-editing would have improved readability. Mostly the chapters read like university lectures or extracts from dissertations. There are lengthy descriptions of, for example, basic soil properties, climate change and water and its use that might have been summarized with suitable references. The information is not ideally organized, which may have contributed to gaps in the contents, for example, references to what molecular biology might do for olive breeding, but no discussion of breeding itself, frequent references to costs, but few data on physical inputs. Further, some topics are discussed in two or even more chapters, with overlap, and in some chapters sentences or larger amounts of information are repeated a page or two later. Given the haphazard structure of the book, the index is especially important and here I was disappointed.

Despite the caveats, the book can be recommended to anyone with an interest in olives, simply because it is so informative.