Comparative Biogeography: Discovering and Classifying Biogeographical Patterns of a Dynamic Earth. Lynne R. Parenti and Malte C. Ebach. 2009. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-25945-4. 312 p. $39.95 (hard cover).—In Comparative Biogeography, authors Lynne Parenti and Malte Ebach present a concise history of the science of biogeography and provide a succinct summary of classic biogeographic methods. The book is written for scientists interested in learning the fundamentals of biogeography and how the science developed from map drawing to explicit hypothesis testing. It provides examples on how analyses are conducted as well as insights into the people and questions that have helped form the science. The book is divided into three sections, each of which contains several chapters. The first section, History and Homology, chronicles the development of biogeography from the early work of Candolle and Lamark in 1805 through the increasingly sophisticated treatments of Prichard, Murray, Wallace, and Merriam (whose work included the first usage of the adjective ‘‘bio-geographic’’ in English). The section also introduces a theme that will be recapitulated throughout the book: biotic area homology. This is seen as the fundamental unit in biogeography, akin to the idea of a taxon in phylogenetics. The second section, Methods, is perhaps the most valuable section of the book. Within this section, the authors outline several classical approaches to biogeographic research. They clearly outline the major methods in both systematic biogeography and evolutionary biogeography. In the former category, the authors include methods which are descriptive and do not rely on a priori hypotheses. The authors give the majority of their emphasis within this category on panbiogeography and cladistic analyses such as component analysis. Within the category ‘‘evolutionary biogeography,’’ the authors include those techniques using evolutionary, geologic, or geographic mechanisms to generate observed distributions. This includes niche analysis, phylogeography, and techniques such as parsimony analysis of endemism (PAE), Brooks parsimony analysis (BPA), and the program DIVA. While enough information is given about each technique for readers to get the gist of them, the book is asymmetrical in its emphasis. The authors focus on component analysis, PAE, and BPA, at the expense of other methods such as niche analysis and phylogeography. Perhaps the most indepth analysis in this section is in chapter seven, ‘‘The Systematic Biogeographic Method,’’ which deals with generating taxa area cladograms and areagrams, solving areagrams and conducting subtree analysis using the optimization program Nelson05. The last section, Implementation, strings together three rather disparate topics, geology, biogeography of the Pacific, and a ‘‘future of the science.’’ The goal was to provide examples where biogeography is applied to a variety of problems. However, unlike the other sections, the chapters here are rather disjointed, and one gets the feeling that these chapters are stand-alone theses that have been shoehorned into a catch-all section. This book contains several features that nicely complement the core text. Each chapter starts with an outline and concludes with a bulleted summary, notes, and a section for further reading. Throughout the book, the authors have used figures to their great advantage. Biogeography is at its heart a visual science, and this book provides numerous maps, trees, and diagrams to help walk readers through tricky points, or simply to highlight an interesting example. In addition, the authors use numerous sidebar boxes to discuss important figures or case studies; this adds a humanizing dimension to the scholarly text. This book is perhaps most useful to scientists who are interested in understanding the origins of biogeography and the historical accidents, personalities, and conflicts that have molded our science. For those who have not been exposed to such phrases as ‘‘assumption 0,’’ who cannot conceive of the vitriol brought about by the dispersal vs. vicariance debate, or who have not encountered the idiosyncrasies of Leon Croizat, then this book will shed light onto current practices in biogeography. To those who have not taken a formal class in biogeography or are too young to have gone through the events, this book provides great insight. This book will be especially useful to students who are going through the older literature and who wish to better understand how the data were analyzed as well as the prevailing intellectual environment of the time. My biggest critique of this book is one of omission. The book only mentions molecular data on two pages, and, in doing so, virtually ignores the revolution to biogeography that molecular techniques have ignited. While it was not the stated scope of the authors to include information about molecular techniques, to virtually ignore the contribution of those techniques is quizzical. Even if they did not want to make the analysis of DNA data their main focus, the book would have been well served to include at least cursory treatment of how molecular techniques could complement more classic biogeographic techniques.