This book has been written by a number of Hungarian authors along with Peter Koltai who is based in Stanford University in California. It represents an updated version of a text published by the first two authors in 1982.
The book is well set out. The first few chapters detail the development, in the neonate, of different airway sounds, followed by the historical background underlying the present understanding. There is an extensive chapter on the assessment methods for children with an abnormal cry, stridor or cough. Interestingly, a significant part of the book is dedicated to the sound analysis of different noises emanating from a child's airway. In total, 47 different pathological sounds have been identified; the authors summarise the value of this acoustic analysis in the final chapter, fortunately!
The book is very well written, communicating well the authors' wealth of experience in dealing with difficult paediatric airways. The chapters make good use of ‘key points’ to highlight important aspects of the text, making the information more absorbable. Each chapter is particularly well referenced, with a further 30 pages of references at the back of the book!
One minor criticism is that the book is entirely black and white within its covers – an injection of colour would have certainly done no harm.
This book is for the experienced ENT surgeon with an interest in paediatric airway disease. It is essential that the reader has a fair degree of knowledge of this subject. Anyone who has not been around, or spent some time understanding, difficult paediatric airways would struggle to get the most out of this book. However, the text itself does offer a real ‘feel’ of the experience that these authors have amassed over a lifetime of dealing with these problems.
Lastly, for those keen to test whether they have the ‘ear’ of a paediatric airway specialist, a DVD is enclosed with a range of different paediatric airway noises. The only problem I had was that they kept on loading into iTunes – not the sort of noises I want to hear when I am walking down the road listening to my iPod!
