Book publishers in New Zealand and overseas regularly post us new publications in medicine and related fields. These books range from pocket-sized paperbacks to weighty tomes containing almost a thousand pages and retailing for several hundreds of dollars. Increasingly, some of these larger textbooks have electronic media attached (CDs).

Although we occasionally review books ourselves, the editor usually instructs my assistant and I to send such books to suitable reviewers throughout New Zealand, especially to our regular and reliable manuscript reviewers as a token of our appreciation (the reviewer can keep the book afterwards).

With medical professionals being very busy people and book reviews not being our core business, to date we have followed a hands-off approach of not setting deadlines nor reminding reviewers (unlike manuscript reviews).

This policy may need to change, however, as a sizeable percentage of book reviews never get written despite the best of intentions. Interestingly we seem to get many completed book reviews after the summer holidays, which suggests that this is the only time available for some people to read large books.

Therefore, if you received a book several months ago but don’t have the time to write the review, then please pass the book to a suitable colleague willing and able to undertake this task. The reviewer need not read every page of the book nor does the review have to be long or eloquent (many book reviews contain less than one full page of text). A concise, clearly written summary of the book is all that is required. To assist you, see the journal archives http://www.nzma.org.nz/journal/archive.shtml for examples of published book reviews.

We will also consider unsolicited book reviews, and we welcome correspondence (stating your credentials and preferred subjects) from volunteers keen to write book reviews for the NZMJ in the future.