WHO Handbook on Indoor Radon: A Public Health Perspective

It is difficult to write a new textbook on a classical subject like water treatment without producing a tome with merely cosmetic differences. But Frank R. Spellman has succeeded. This book has so many distinguishing features that it easily stands apart, and tall, in the midst of other books on this subject. Spellman has an unusual academic background. Before taking his MS and PhD degrees in environmental engineering he had read for a bachelor’s degree in public administration! This makes him an environmental engineer with insight into the real world where changes have to be made through politics. The first ‘unique selling proposition’ of the book is that it is designed to make a fullfledged water treatment professional out of anyone with little more formal education than preparatory schooling in basic sciences and mathematics. To achieve this near-impossible task Spellman treats everything from its bare-bone fundamentals onwards, but does so in easy and crisp steps which follow each other with a maximum of precision and minimum of fuss. So the chapter ‘Water/Wastewater Math Operations‘ begins almost with the teaching of how to add 1 and 1. A table quickly appears to tell the uninitiated how many inches make a foot and how many millilitres make a litre. Spellman then goes to bigger and bigger things: flow-rates, retention times, chemical dosage calculations, bioprocess engineering fundamentals, and so on. Soon, without even being conscious of it, one finds oneself making a wastewater treatment systems design – something one would have thought only a postgraduate in environmental engineering could achieve. In the course of teaching water treatment system design to students at postgraduate level, this reviewer has often found great difficulty in communicating engineering concepts to those who had graduated in non-engineering subjects. Spellman’s, book gives several clues to performing the balancing act without being seen doing it! Yet there are points against this book, which should be overcome through its next edition. Cartoons and photographs are absent. These would have strengthened Spellman’s explanation and would be expected in India. Even more so because Spellman keeps whetting the reader’s appetite with teasers (‘Do you know?’), quotations, and wisecracks. Photographs would naturally underline the words with the realities they describe. They would make a student into a water treatment specialist more swiftly. A short introductory piece on the author says he has authored, yes, 55 books! If all this writing has produced some fatigue, this book does not show it. Rather, the writing oozes energy and enthusiasm. This writer is a well of inspiration.