This one-volume multiauthored book aspires modestly "to provide significant information regarding concepts and their applications for basic scientists and clinicians." These objectives are widely exceeded by a product that is highly successful on many fronts.
The potential pitfalls of a neuroimmunology text include excessive repetition of fundamental immunological principles, viewpoints narrowly concentrated on the work of the authors and their associates, and dry orthodoxies that were overly familiar from recent reviews. Editors Jack Antel, Gary Birnbaum, and Hans-Peter Hartung cleverly avoided these snares. The contributors (from Europe, Canada, and the United States) produced an unusually heterogeneous spectrum of opinions and ideas. Where personal viewpoints are proposed, they are identified as such, and the book is remarkably generous and broad-minded. Topics were chosen astutely so that there is an abundance of non-overlapping and outstandingly useful background material on issues as diverse as Alzheimer's disease, human immunodeficiency virus and human T-cell lymphotrophic virus I pathogenesis, Lyme disease, viral-immune interactions, and vasculitides. There is a refreshing and particularly strong series of contributions concerning inflammatory and immune-mediated processes in peripheral nerve and muscle, further adding to the book's value. Worth the price of admission all by itself is Byron Waksman's chapter on "Overview and Historical Perspective," in which he manages to raise most of the salient current questions in neuroimmunology in the context of a re Β΄sume Β΄of the field.