The other three original editors have found a new focus to their careers outside mainstream clinical oncologic practice. Each chapter provides a semistructured review covering the presentation, pathologic characteristics, natural history, and management of rare tumors. This format will save clinicians hours of time on literature searches. Oncology is, in general, a fast-moving specialty with little role for textbooks, which are inevitably out of date by the time of their publication. Indeed, there are few references in this book that are later than 1997.
Most clinicians use original studies as their source material rather than reviews in textbooks.
However, in the field of unusual cancers, there are inevitably fewer changes and much of the source material consists of case reports, which often were published decades ago in obscure journals not held by medical libraries. For these reasons, this textbook is particularly welcome as a source of definitive information on the treatment of unusual tumors. Inevitably, there is room for improvement. Despite all of these praises for a most useful addition to any departmental library, I cannot understand how publishers can justify the price tag of medical texts.