Donald PJ. The Difficult Case in Head and Neck Cancer Surgery. Thieme; 2010; 560 pgs.; 993 illustrations; $209.99

Reading through many head and neck cases, the radiologist frequently is not aware of patients’ physical appearances with many of these abnormalities, nor of their postoperative appearance. Because this book deals with difficult head and neck cases, the reader can quickly view the external manifestations of such tumors. That, of course, is only one benefit of this 560-page hardcover book, written and edited by Dr. Donald, who was assisted by 9 other contributors. There is a wealth of information here for the neuroradiologist—information that will make his/her interpretations of CTs and MRs more meaningful.

The book contains 17 chapters, each of which deals with cancers of different areas of the head and neck. In general, each chapter follows a similar format, showing anatomic features, photographs of the in vivo tumors, histopathology, surgical approaches (with excellent surgical drawings depicting surrounding anatomic landmark), case histories with specific examples, and post-therapy photographs of patients. While scattered imaging is included in some chapters, an opportunity was lost to correlate CTs/MRs. That does not take away the value of this textbook because, from this reviewer’s standpoint, the benefit of this publication is to show what the surgeon deals with in difficult cases and the decisions made in the operative approaches.