This is a very significant contribution to an expanding area of plastic surgery. This work not only updates the only prior pediatric plastic surgery text, but significantly and appropriately enlarges its scope.
The work is divided into six sections of unequal length, titled as follows: "Homeostasis, Disequilibrium, and Stress," "Head and Neck," "The Trunk," "Genitalia," "Upper Extremity," and "Lower Extremity." The quality of the contributing authors is generally excellent and the editors have utilized outstanding people from all over the world, making this an international text.
The usual problems of textbooks, and particularly multiauthored ones, are, unfortunately, also well represented. These problems include an uneven quality of some chapters and an unavoidable, long lag between writing and publishing, which has rendered some sections obsolete. It is, for example, not acceptable in a 1984 chapter on craniosynostosis to omit descriptions of the contributions of Marchac or Whittaker, show only one postoperative