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Book review |
28.00, softback; 248pp. ISBN: 90-265-1930-3.
University of Newcastle, UK
| The first 250 words of the full text of this article appear below. Images appear only in PDF or full-text views. |
Hydrogeology is served by few introductory-level texts. The classic of the genre remains Michael Price's book ‘Introducing Groundwater’, which forms the inevitable yardstick against which analogous texts tend to be judged. It is a very exacting yardstick, to be fair. Sadly Nonner's ‘Introduction to Hydrogeology’ does not measure up to it. Published in a series flagged as ‘IHE Delft Lecture Notes’, the text thankfully doesn't read like a collation of lecture handouts; in fact the production standard is very impressive, especially in view of the modest price. The strong points of the book are its accuracy and clarity. However, the ordering of material is not well designed for a newcomer to the topic. For instance, the presentation of groundwater flow processes in Chapter 3 takes a very mathematical approach, holding back the more accessible notion of groundwater budgets to the following chapter. It would have made the presentation of continuity (using the classic elementary volume approach) far more accessible to the novice if this order had been reversed.
The geological aspects of the text are rather disappointing. Brief and simplistic generalizations about different rock types are compounded by a disturbing lack of correspondence between photographic images and the comments made upon them in the text. For instance a comment on page 56 referring to Figure 2.7 is clearly intended to refer to the facing Figure 2.11, but even if that adjustment is made, the reference to unsorted deposits is at odds with the obvious graded bedding visible in the photo.
