H.-R. Wenk and A. Bulakh, Minerals: Their Constitution and Origin. Cambridge University Press, 2004, xxii + 646 pp. Price £95 (US $ 130) (hardback) ISBN 0 52182238 6, £35 (US $ 70) (paperback) ISBN 0 52152958 1.

Abstract

This comprehensive book by Hans-Rudolf Wenk from Berkeley and Andrei Bulakh from St. Petersburg aims (according to the Preface) to be “an introduction to mineralogy for undergraduate students and graduate students in all fields of geology, materials science, and environmental sciences...”. It enters a field with stiff competition. The authors comment on the pressures worldwide to shorten the time available to teach mineralogy and their aim was a book that “provides an alternative to existing texts by focussing more tightly on concepts, at the expense of completeness, and by integrating geological processes and applications more closely with the discussions of systematic mineralogy”. Later in the Preface the authors suggest that the content of the whole book should be the minimum a ‘mineralogy graduate student’ (a species I fear long extinct in the UK, except perhaps in Cambridge) should know. The book is modular and for one-semester courses the authors suggest sections and chapters that might be dropped. I read the book with these objectives in mind and tried to put myself in the place of an average student, a state of which I have personal experience. My first impression was that one would have to talk mighty fast to fit even a fraction into a single semester. The book is a comprehensive treatment not only of mineralogy, but also includes, in the later sections, some igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary petrology, and discussions of soil formation and mineral deposits. It is therefore broader in scope than most conventional mineralogy books. Copiously illustrated with drawings and half-tone photographs in the text, and with a nice 16 page central section in colour with pictures of interference figures, thin sections and museum-style mineral specimens, the general appearance is impressive. The text includes three types of box: ‘technical boxes’, which give detail, sometimes mathematical, which …