A glance at the spine of the dust-cover or the binding of this book suggests that it is a work on snow and ice written by W. D. Kingery. This is not the case; he is the editor of a collection of 46 papers by workers of international repute, presented by invitation to a conference originally entitled “Engineering Glaciology” and sponsored jointly by the U.S. Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories and the U.S. Naval Civil Engineering Laboratory.

The papers are grouped under six main headings: ice properties, glacier flow, solidification phenomena and sea ice, bearing capacity of sea ice, snow properties, and ablation. Within each heading there are papers of high quality on a wide variety of topics—even wider than the headings suggest. Many of the papers have a strong engineering or utilitarian flavour (for example there is one on the construction of sea ice platforms and another on ice reinforcement), but there are also several on basic physics, such as the Eshelby-Schoeck viscous dislocation damping mechanism applied to the steady-state creep of ice, and studies of ice etching and dislocation etch pits. As a whole the volume is probably outstanding for the number of contributions on sea ice. Details of some of the papers are given in “Glaciological literature” in this Journal (Vol. 5, No. 37, 1964).

The book is produced by a photo-litho process; the general layout, which is consistent and clear, and the good quality of the diagrams and photographs, are a credit to the editor and the publisher, but at some cost to the purchaser. It will annoy some authors to find, and many busy readers to learn, that the abstracts have been deleted from the texts. None of the conference discussions are included.

The book will find a useful place in the library of any snow and ice specialist, or of anyone concerned with engineering operations in that field.