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Before I received this book for review, I was expecting a conventional academic publication full of verbose text, perhaps with the occasional graph or chart to depict mortality rates across the country. How wrong I was! This is a startlingly comprehensive book that provides a wealth of information about causes of death around Britain (excluding Northern Ireland) during 1981 to 2004, grouped around 1,282 author-identified neighbourhoods, and presented as a large (A4 size) textbook full of maps, photographs, charts and tables. Visually it is stunning. Using records from 14,833,696 deaths, for each cause of death, one page is devoted to written information that includes a definition of what that class of deaths includes, a brief account of the rates and a percentage breakdown of different causes of death in the category. For example, 'Respiratory deaths' (p. 20) are broken down as follows: asthma (2.1%), bronchitis (0.7%), chronic lower respiratory disease (34.3%), industrial lung diseases (1.2%), other respiratory disorders (7.7%), influenza (0.6%) and pneumonia (53.4%). For each cause...