Review of Essentials of Airway Management: Dolenska et al., Greenwich Medical Books: Greenwich, UK, 2006, 140 pp ISBN: 1-841101-53-2; Price £17.50 To paraphrase a well-known television advertisement, ‘this book does what it says on the cover’. In the preface, the author describes the book as a concise and basic text for senior health officers (SHOs) in anaesthesia and operating department assistants, but it has much more to offer than that. Drawing together aspects of airway management into a single text should appeal to a wide range of anaesthetists, including those responsible for teaching airway skills. In what is becoming an increasingly crowded training agenda in anaesthesia, perhaps we should focus more explicitly on a subject which remains at the heart of maintaining the safety of our patients. The 140 pages are divided between 12 chapters. The book begins with Airway Assessment, followed by Anatomy and Routine Intubation. Six out of the following seven chapters discuss airway management in the context of the common clinical scenarios a trainee would be expected to encounter. These include Abdominal Surgery, Obstetrics, and Head and Neck Surgery. Somewhat puzzlingly, a chapter on Airway Management Without Intubation appears in the middle of this section. It doesn't seem logical to leave the discussion of basic airway management (such as maintaining an airway using a face mask with or without adjuncts) until Chapter 7. We would have preferred a chapter on the general aspects of airway management including intubation to have followed Anatomy and then Airway Assessment. Perhaps the order in which the chapters have been arranged reflects the challenge in developing and teaching a strategic model for managing the airway as well as coaching the generic concepts and skills. Intubation dominates most trainees approach to assessing and managing the airway and, to a degree, the book mirrors this. It is quite a challenge to teach individuals to consider the wider aspects of airway management in individual patients and avoid becoming preoccupied with intubation. The penultimate chapter entitled The Difficult Airway offers an effective overview of the subject. Since it deals with some of the more basic airway problems that beginners are bound to encounter through lack of experience, this chapter should have appeared much earlier. Setting aside the order, each chapter is concise, methodical, and readable. The text consists of an effective blend of short paragraphs and either numbered or bulleted points. The layout is enhanced by a plentiful selection of diagrams, pictures, and tables. Each chapter is concluded with a short summary of key points and a limited bibliography. The authors guide the reader through each subject step by step. Their descriptions paint a clear picture of the clinical processes that are taking place and this is typified by the chapter on Surgery in the Prone Position. Apart from one or two minor niggles, the content of the chapters is comprehensive, clinically sound, in line with common practice, and would be difficult to improve upon. One area that appears to have been overlooked is the effect of different types of anaesthesia on the airway and ventilation and how this necessarily influences the approach to airway management (e.g. inhalational induction). Though there is a section on complications in recovery, the authors don't mention how and why emergence may be accompanied by airway problems and how to minimize the frequency of them. Perhaps it would be helpful to guide the trainee through the phases of losing and regaining consciousness and the resulting changes that take place in the airway and with ventilation. The other issue relates to ‘test inflations before giving the paralysing agent’ described in the chapter Routine Intubation. If this proves difficult (which is not uncommon for inexperienced trainees) the reader is referred to the chapter on the Difficult Airway. However, careful reading of this chapter fails to reveal a clear action plan for a scenario that trainees will inevitably face and may confuse them. Setting aside the arrangement of the chapters and the detail in one or two areas, it is difficult to think of ways in which the book can be enhanced. We will be recommending it to trainees and others learning about airway management.