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On receiving this book, my first thought was—“Oh no not another book on nanoparticles”, even though the editors have tried to hide this using the title Nanotechnology-Driven Engineered Materials—New Insights. Well it was a nice surprise to realise that yes, there is a lot of nano and nanoparticles in the book, but there is also a lot of new material that makes it into an interesting read. The book has five editors; personally, I did not understand why books have so many editors. It is divided into three parts with 13 chapters and these chapters have a total of 42 contributing authors. With so many authors, you do see a lot of variation in the topics and quality. However, with this number of authors you also get very different viewpoints and very different ideas and thoughts. It is the variation that makes the book both a good read and a good buy.

Part 1 of the book has a covering title of Nanoparticle Assembly and Nanostructured Materials. What does that mean as the six chapters in this part did not help in the explanation? Maybe for an expert in the field there is a link, but I could not find it. The nice thing, however, was that these chapters did give me a good understanding of nanostructured materials. However, I should warn you that the chapters are laid out and written in the style of research papers—something I do not like in a book which I think requires a different style of writing. Part 1 is not an easy read and I had to really think hard about the maths and both Chapters 1 and 6. Which are very math based. However, they are balanced by other more readable chapters in between.

Part 2 containing four chapters is far more readable and does give a good insight and understanding of nanocomposite properties. In fact, the chapters in this part really open up the idea of what is being done with nanoparticles, but more importantly what are the possibilities of what can be done with them.

The final part consists of three chapters and focuses on biomedical applications. These chapters present a good overview, but there was a lot of overlap from the previous chapters and the description of the “sol–gel” process should certainly have been cut. However, Part 3 is the most readable of all the books and it the most mind stimulating, as it makes you think of just what can be done with nanocomposites and maybe more importantly, where is the killer application.

Overall, a book that tests you on your maths but in so doing makes you think and in doing so leads you to consider new ideas and applications of nanocomposites.