Joel C Seidman, MD (William Beaumont Hospitals)

current state of knowledge about and clinical management of acute and chronic hypersensitivity pneumonitis.

munobiology of these diverse maladies of inflammatory interstitial lung disease continue to be only partially understood, the fascination with them derives from their relative infrequency, their association with environmental or exogenous, identifiable, and potentially excludable provocateurs, and their exceptional responsiveness to anti-inflammatory pharmacotherapy, most notably glucocorticoids, compared to other interstitial lung diseases.

The audience is pulmonologists and occupational medicine specialists with an interest in the aberrant biology and clinical response to the inhalation of environmental provocateurs or consumption of implicated pharmaceutical agents.

The book is edited by an internationally renowned and veteran expert on inflammatory interstitial lung disease, most notably sarcoidosis, with approximately two dozen additional contributors.

Within the broad genera of interstitial lung disease, this book focuses solely on the subject of hypersensitivity pneumonitis, acknowledging its place as an inflammatory phenomenon with the title "hypersensitivity pneumonitis" rather than "hypersensitivity pneumonia." Illustrations and graphics are limited, but sufficient. The references at the end of each chapter are extensive and relevant and the index is a thorough and useful. There is some inconsistency in style of presentation between chapters, suggesting little collaboration between the authors (e.g., chapter 9 is the only one with case studies).

While this book is informative and up to date, and despite the fact it has been acknowledged as the only authoritative text devoted to this subject in the last two decades, I am not convinced that it offers much more than dedicated chapters in comprehensive pulmonary medicine textbooks.

Nonetheless, it achieves its intended goals and would be useful to pulmonologists or occupational medicine specialists.