John Atkinson's latest offering is based on his two previous books -The Mechanics of Soils (with Peter Bransby) and Foundations and Slopes. Although titled The Mechanics of Soils and Foundations, it also deals with earth retaining structures and slopes. It aims to cover the geotechnical engineering content of undergraduate degree courses in civil engineering.
The introductory chapters explain basic mechanics and material behaviour. This should help to link soil behaviour in the minds of students with subjects they will be studying in other courses, and might overcome the idea that students frequently have that geotechnical engineering is a 'different' subject. It is also good to see a chapter on geology included, something which is sadly missing from many soil mechanics texts. However, the chapter is rather brief, only covering the formation of soils. Since the book is unashamedly devoted to soil engineering this may be sufficient, but my feeling is that just a paragraph or two describing the basic rock types and how they were formed would not have been out of place.
The book uses the concepts of critical state soil mechanics for the unifying framework within which ideas are presented. Six chapters deal with compression and swelling, the critical state strength, peak states, behaviour of soil before failure, Cam Clay and stiffness of soil. This material is similar to that contained in The Mechanics of Soils but with the introduction of nonlinear stiffness behaviour. Later in the book the familiar approaches of upper and lower bound theorems and limit equilibrium are used to investigate stability. Nevertheless, for each application (foundations, slopes, retaining walls) some discussion is made of the state of stress involved and the stress paths followed. The purpose of these is to provide an understanding of the problem; they are not developed further into methods for design.
Laboratory testing rates a whole chapter, whereas in situ testing is only allocated a subsection in a chapter on ground investigation. I can understand the reasoning for this in that many of the routine field tests can only be interpreted in an empirical fashion, and do not fit within the unifying principles of the book. As Atkinson says 'Almost all we know about soil behaviour has been learned from laboratory tests'. Nevertheless, one of the dangers of this could be that students would gain the impression that all geotechnical design can be carried out using fundamental principles whereas in reality most geotechnical design makes use of empirical rules of thumb. While it is the fundamental principles and concepts we must be teaching in a university education, students should not be misled as to their applicability.
A controversial aspect to the book is the recommendation to adopt the critical state angle of friction ~b' c as the basis for design. In fact, when he starts to discuss stability, Atkinson goes as far as to define the drained strength as 0960-3182 9 1993 Chapman & Hall