This is the Holy Grail of texts for anyone involved in the management of vestibular schwannoma. Edited by Matthew Carlson from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, the Associate Editors are from the same department, but the 156 contributors to the book’s 84 chapters are drawn from all over the world.
It’s clear that a great deal of thought and hard work went into the planning of this text. Vestibular schwannoma is a topic on which the scientific literature consists mainly of case series. The chapters of this book carefully and critically examine the existing literature, and present it alongside the authors’ extensive experience, providing a holistic and balanced book.
It is split into subsections; for example there are 11 chapters in the ‘Radiation’ subsection. And each of these chapters addresses a very specific topic in useful detail. Indeed, one of my favourite features in this book is that in each chapter there are recommendations for further reading within the same book. This is a very clever feat of editing, which means there is little repetition. It also means it’s difficult to put the book down; an experience reminiscent of the Choose Your Own Adventure books which those of you who were children in the 1980s or 1990s will undoubtedly remember.
This excellent book covers all bases. Until such time that an earth-shattering discovery changes the way vestibular schwannoma is diagnosed, monitored and managed, there will be no need for more texts on this topic. This one has already hit the jackpot.
