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This is a splendid and amazing book. The 11 authors have distilled their wisdom and experience in teaching SEM and analytical microscopy into this collection of laboratory exercises and solutions. The book falls into three parts.Part I contains laboratory exercises on SEM, STEM, and microanalysis (150 pages).Part I1 is a guide to specimen preparation (30 pages). Although listed as exercises like section I, in fact this is a descriptive guide to the field and no solutions are provided. More extensive references are given in this section than elsewhere.Part I11 provides solutions to section I (200 pages).These are much more than "solutions." They give examples of how the data might appear, explanations, and nuggets of understanding and summarized theory.The material covered is so broad that a single reviewer would have difficulty with the book. We decided to review it collectively (not quite as many of us as the number of authors) among the microscopy staff of the Center for Microanalysis of Materials.The laboratory exercises are limited to materials science and physical sciences. Biomedical samples are not discussed. In addition there is no coverage of basic transmission electron microscopy; the TEM and STEM appear in the section on analytical electron microscopy but only the analytical aspects are discussed. With these exceptions, the book covers just about every possible aspect of SEM, EDX, and analytical microscopy. The exercises presented are based on the successful short-courses that have been held in Lehigh University for many years; they are said to be complementary to three standard but more conventional texts that together cover the same field. However, it seems to us that this book stands on its own, perhaps more than the authors intended. For many users, this basic, practical presentation of the information will be more helpful than the more formal and intimidating texts.Evidently as a result of the years of refinement at Lehigh, the experiments are very carefully directed and efficient. The experiments and solutions deal with the set up, choice of parameters, character of the results, and so on in a way that very effecitvely demonstrates the difference between good and bad, the right and the wrong way to obtain data. In short the book communicates much practical know-how; it allows the reader to avoid or recognize artifacts and errors; it provides a direct route to successful microanalysis; and it replaces much of the hard work of learning from mistakes with the authors' collective experience.The authors have done a fine job of making the exercises machine-independent, where this is possible. However, in some fields (computer-aided imaging, for example), there is just too much variation in the hardware and too many approaches to what can be done to write a unified experiment. The authors are aware of this and draw attention to it. Otherwise the experiments are portable and will be valuable to users of all makes and models of microscope.The book tends to be imprecise and careless at times, perhaps refle...

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