| HOME | HELP | FEEDBACK | SUBSCRIPTIONS | ARCHIVE | SEARCH | TABLE OF CONTENTS |
|
|
|
|||||||
|
|||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
School of Natural Resources-Soil Science, The Ohio State University, Wooster, OH, USA. 44691
(E-mail: dick.5{at}osu.edu)
Ronald M. Atlas and Jim C. Philp (Editors). ASM Press, American Society for Microbiology, Washington, DC. 2005. 378 p. $109.95. ISBN 1–55581–239–2. Hardcover.
Protecting human health and the environment from pollution has become a societal mandate. However, given that many purposed or accidental past and present activities have introduced pollutants into the environment, the question arises as to what are the most effective ways to remove them? The ability of microbes to degrade or sequester harmful pollutants is the subject of this timely and well-written book. It describes the state of knowledge in an easy to read, yet informative format.
The book has nine chapters and begins with an overview of the role for bioremediation as a restoration technology. This chapter includes interesting and important economic comparisons of using bioremediation versus other remediation technologies for cleanup. Chapter 2 provides information on ways to characterize contaminated land. The legal and regulatory framework for bioremediation follows in Chapter 3 and includes both an American and a United Kingdom perspective. I found this chapter to be very useful and informative. It would be an excellent resource for anyone wanting a quick overview that cuts through the legalese and many acronyms associated with regulatory rules and processes. Chapter 4 deals with modeling bioremediation of contaminated groundwater. Chapter 5 is the strongest chapter in the book and also the longest. It is 98 pages in length and deals with the topic of bioremediation of contaminated soils and aquifers. A total of 373 references are cited at the end of this chapter. Monitoring bioremediation is the topic of Chapter 6. The next two chapters deal with bioremediation of specific types of contaminants with Chapter 7 dealing with the bioremediation of marine oil spills and Chapter 8 the bioremediation of metals and radionuclides. The last chapter gives a very brief overview of preemptive bioremediation strategies that can reduce potential environmental problems and liabilities and make industrial products and processes more socially acceptable (e.g., by basing products on renewable resources that are biodegradable and that create fewer pollutants during their manufacture).
Text is arranged in a two-column format on each page and is crisp and easy to read with text size being approximately 10 point except for the call-out boxes where smaller text size is used. The illustrations and photographs are all in gray scale. However, they are well done and generally preserve sufficient detail for good viewing.
An attractive feature of the book is the use of call-out boxes where more specialized information, illustrations, or examples of real world applications of a specific bioremediation method are described. I found that I would read these even before the main part of each chapter.
References are included at the end of each chapter in numbered, alphabetical order. Most chapters do an excellent job of citing relevant and recent papers. A total of 1195 references were cited in the book although there is overlap with some references being cited in more than one chapter. I generally rate a book harshly that does a poor job of indexing but this book included approximately 9.5 pages of listings useful for finding specific subject matter material in the book.
Overall I found the book to be an excellent resource and I have already assigned a chapter in it for one of my graduate students to read. There is some overlap among chapters that is to be expected for a book that has multiple authors who all work in a similar research area. However, the editors have chosen the topics and authors carefully and the overlap is not extensive and in some cases actually helps build a stronger story on a particular subject matter area. I would highly recommend this book as resource material for a course in bioremediation and for researchers wanting both an introductory view as well as a way to obtain more in-depth information on a particular subject related to bioremediation.
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| HOME | HELP | FEEDBACK | SUBSCRIPTIONS | ARCHIVE | SEARCH | TABLE OF CONTENTS |
