Diseases of Banana, Abacá and Enset. Edited by D. R. Jones. 16 cm × 24 cm, 544 pp. Wallingford, UK: CABI Publishing, 1999. £85. ISBN 085199 355 9 (hardback). (2001)

Reading through this impressive and outstanding volume, I was reminded of my short adventures in banana diseases, a brief career that took me on a whirlwind tour of south-east Asia to review project possibilities and, on several later trips, to St Lucia to manage a project on crown rot. I remember the crown rot project largely because the laboratory of Ulrike Krauss was famously swept out to sea by floods, traversing 2 km of land before finally being set afloat. Fortunately the laboratory was not occupied. I remember my visit to the Bureau of Plant Industry (BPI) in Davao because I took the wrong driver from the hotel and he took me to the wrong BPI. Arriving at the BPI and waiting for it to open, I was at first curious to see the armed guards and armoured cars, before slowly realizing I was at the Bank of the Philippine Islands. Lydia Magnaye of the (correct) BPI is one of the many scientists across the globe who have been used by David Jones to update and modernize the much used original volumes on banana, abacá and enset diseases prepared by Stover and Wardlaw nearly 30 years ago. The present volume follows the original format of the Stover book. Here, then, we have a worthy and attractive successor which, in addition to summarizing the many advances over the intervening period, adds to the original Stover format with new sections on quarantine and breeding for resistance. The book is profusely illustrated with excellent colour photographs, many of which give a pleasing recognition to the scientists behind the advances in knowledge and increased ability to manage the diseases. The quality of colour reproduction and printing is equally high – features I wanted to highlight for once, since my experience with other books is often less favourable. I should declare an interest as a CABI employee, while also claiming to make a disinterested appraisal of all books submitted for review. So, as a minor antidote to this effusive praise, let me suggest some things that are missing or could be done better. I return firstly to a constant bugbear, namely the index. Two indexes are provided, the first on species of Musa and Ensete, subgroups and clone sets and cultivars of banana, abacá and enset. This is useful, but only to a limited extent. There are over 100 references to Cavendish, for example, some of which are distinguished with a superscript to denote ‘illustration’. No further information is provided and there is no clue as to what might be found in the other page references. The same problem occurs with Australia, to take one example, in the general index. Presumably the reader has a reason for looking up Australia – perhaps to locate a particular disease – yet they would have to wade through more than 100 page references to find the relevant text. The diseases are grouped according to those that attack foliage, root plus corm and pseudostem, and fruit, with separate chapters on bacterial, virus and nematode diseases. If you have a particular interest in a disease, or have narrowed a problem down to a limited range of possibilities, then this book is easy to access. If you have a more general query, then it is more of a struggle. I mention this because the subdued blurb on the back cover does promise that this is a ‘diagnostic manual’. Well, this may be true up to a point, I would suggest, bearing in mind that diagnosis is probably best achieved by flicking through the photographs in the hope of finding particular symptoms. A diagnostic manual needs to guide the reader, and I would have liked to see summarized lists of diseases, perhaps with more information about incidence and their relative severity or importance. The dipping and skimming approach to discovery reveals that this is much more than a ‘diseases’ book, something the title might have usefully indicated, without necessarily going to the wordiness of an early Woody Allen film. There are comprehensive chapters on injuries to bananas caused by adverse climate and weather, chemicals and genetic abnormalities. Who could ask for anything more? Insect pests hardly seem to merit a serious treatment compared with the losses due to pathogens. There can be no denying that this is the outstanding book on banana, abacá and enset diseases. It is well written, tightly edited and full of excellent colour photos. It is an apt recognition of solid research achievements and progress over the last 30 years and a pointer to new and exciting efforts to engineer disease resistance. It demands to be bought, read and distilled by a wide audience.