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A. MEUNIER Clays.

Springer, Berlin, 2005, 472 pp., Price 89.95. ISBN 3-540-21667-7.

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

Many of the ‘classic’ books about clay minerals are ageing a little. These books are still valid and in use but much information has been collected and some important concepts have been discussed more deeply since they were published. Thus, the timing of this new monograph on clays is good. It appears to be the translation of the French version, ‘Argiles’, published in 2003 by Editions Scientifiques GB and the Société Géologique de France. The author has made a great effort to address most of the clay-related topics that one can find in the literature, with the exception of industrial applications and Civil Engineering. In this, I believe, he is to be congratulated, because he offers a very complete view of all the questions involved in clay mineral studies, and of all the environments and modes of occurrence of these minerals. His aim is to describe clay minerals at all size scales from crystal structure to geological, showing how the characteristics at the smaller dimensions influence those at larger scales. The plan is very appropriate and the table of contents offers a very complete panorama of clay studies and clays in natural environments. There is one missing topic, however, that has emerged recently and is growing rapidly even if we are still at a very early stage of its development. This topic is clay-microbe, or more generally clay-bioprocess, interaction. This omission makes the book less up-to-date.

Unfortunately, the actual contents of the book fall below the standard of the book plan. As I was reading, it felt as if the text was composed by putting together teaching notes without succeeding in giving coherence to the text, connecting the different sections in the chapters and the chapters themselves. The book does not tell a story, it rather bombards you with . . . [Full Text of this Article]