Immune to Kuby legacy

This is the first edition of Janis Kuby's textbook of immunology in which Kuby is not an author. Her own first edition offered a comprehensive introduction to immunology for students of science and medicine. Unfortunately, in this latest edition it is rare to find references to information published in the past three years. Kuby has always offered study questions at the end of each chapter. However, there are too few new questions, probably in proportion to the new material elsewhere. A positive feature is the clear, well-drafted colour illustrations and a helpful set of common icons.

Other novelties include the 15 eclectic clinical focus essays and the web addresses of internet resources (sadly, several of these are outdated or miswritten). The book consists of 23 chapters that divide the subject matter into four thematic areas: introduction; generation of B and T-cell responses; immune effector mechanisms; and health and disease. It is a reasonable general text and it has a few excellent features.

Richard A. Lake is research fellow, Western Australian Institute for Medical Research.