Before I received this book for review, I was expecting a conventional academic publication full of verbose text, perhaps with the occasional graph or chart to depict mortality rates across the country. How wrong I was! This is a startlingly comprehensive book that provides a wealth of information about causes of death around Britain (excluding Northern Ireland) during 1981 to 2004, grouped around 1,282 author-identified neighbourhoods, and presented as a large (A4 size) textbook full of maps, photographs, charts and tables. Visually it is stunning. Using records from 14,833,696 deaths, for each cause of death, one page is devoted to written information that includes a definition of what that class of deaths includes, a brief account of the rates and a percentage breakdown of different causes of death in the category. For example, ‘Respiratory deaths’ (p. 20) are broken down as follows: asthma (2.1%), bronchitis (0.7%), chronic lower respiratory disease (34.3%), industrial lung diseases (1.2%), other respiratory disorders (7.7%), influenza (0.6%) and pneumonia (53.4%). For each cause of death, all this information is accompanied by a large map of Britain on the adjoining page, which uses brightly-coloured hexagons to indicate the distribution of the deaths.

For those readers interested in causes of death by age, the text causes of death are arranged by average age at time of death. As a result, for those wanting a quick reference about older people, they need only flip to the back of the book. To provide you with a couple of brief examples of the detail in this book: the average age of death for those dying from Parkinson's disease is 80.4 years; data point to cardiovascular complications as being the biggest cause of death for those aged 60 or more years; and it is not until the 85–89 age group that other causes of death start to grow in number, with cerebrovascular disease and pneumonia dominating. The last cause of death in the text is simply entitled ‘old age’, which covers 152,564 deaths in the period and the authors define this as including ‘those who are deemed to have died from senility without mention of psychosis, that is, old age without suffering from dementia’ (p. 220). They add, ‘with the highest average age of death, at 91.2 years, to die of old age without senility is to die well’ (p. 220).

For readers interested in how the book was created, the introduction sets out how the data taken from death records were utilised to generate the ‘standardised mortality ratio’ (SMR), which is then mapped for Britain (and there is more detail in a comprehensive technical appendix). As a snapshot of mortality rates around the United Kingdom over 23 years, this is an excellent publication and will be invaluable for anyone who wants a quick reference text. At times the sheer volume of information is quite overwhelming, so it may not be the type of book one reads from cover to cover, and therefore perhaps should be treated as an engaging and stimulating reference compendium. Unfortunately, given the nature of the subject matter, the book will date quickly (at the time of writing it is already referring to deaths from between 5–28 years ago), so it could be useful if the authors produced a supplementary text in five to 15 years time that details further changes. Not knowing how long this text took to compile, I am not sure how feasible that would be.

My one criticism of the text is that although numerous references and website addresses are provided, I would like to have seen a more consistent approach throughout to directing the reader to additional sources of information. For example, many medical and social texts on public health have been published and these could have been drawn upon to point interested readers to further work. Despite this gap, as a manual for those wanting a snapshot of the contemporary causes of death in the United Kingdom, this is an extremely accessible source for students, researchers and practitioners. I expect that it will become an important reference point for years to come.