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Marine Red Algae of the Hawaiian Islands. ISABELLA AioNA ABBOTT. 1999. xv + 477 pp. Bishop Museum Press, 1525 Bernice Street, Honolulu, Hawaii 96817, USA. RRP US$60. (hardback: ISBN 1-58178-003-61.
I think it would be safe to say that all those who know Prof. Abbott, and of her indefatigable work on the marine algal flora of Hawaii, have been waiting with exponentially increasing anticipation for `Izzie's book' to hit press. Having been involved with an early draft of it in 1995, I especially have been jumping around like a cat on a hot tin roof waiting for the book to land on my desk. And now all our expectations have been realised. In Italy recently for the 2nd European Phycological Congress, I was literally mobbed by large numbers of people who were eager to find out what the book was like, after they had learned that I had an advance copy to review. A week before that congress, whilst I was working with Prof. Eric Coppejans in Gent (Belgium), I witnessed the near manic and uncontrolled excitement of his students tearing at the brown paper wrapping of a copy, like ravenous wolves at a carcass, that had just arrived from the publishers. I fear, like mine, that their copy will be dog-eared with constant use in the very near future.
The statistics of the book alone are impressive. Detailed descriptions of 343 species in 142 genera, illustrated with 850 pictures, and with keys to families, genera and all species, it would be hard to get an identification wrong using this book. For anyone working on tropical or subtropical floras, it will be the first work to be pulled from the library shelf (and possibly the only one needed) in order to ascertain the name of the alga in hand.
The book starts with a Detailed Contents list to page numbers where Classes, Orders, Families and genera appear and this is augmented with a cross-referenced taxonomic index at the back. Following the Contents is a Preface and Acknowledgments that appear to leave no person unthanked, giving a chronological, anthropological story of the book's inception in 1988 to its acceptance for publication in 1998. This is a lovely demonstration of the self-effacing and overly gratitudinal nature of...