John Woodall

I so wanted to like this book. I'm afraid it is very hard to read, not because the author is uninformed, but because of the organization of the material and the evidence of not insignificant difficulty with scientific english. The text is packed with an enormous amount of information that is badly organized. All too often, one sentence has little to do with the sentence that precedes it and a sense of the overarching mechanisms of a particular neurochemical pathway is left poorly elucidated. I thought this was only true of the first chapter, but my reading of other segments of the book so far indicate it is a widespread problem. Also, there are sections where a combination of difficulty with english is coupled with a shallow understanding of the topic or an obscure and perhaps questionable summary of complex concepts. For instance, consider this set of sentences about rTMS and dementia: "It must be mentioned that rTMS of human patients results in a considerable degree of variability in excitability among patients in different sessions. The frequency of rTMS-mediated stimulation of brain is the main determinant of the direction of excitability. In addition, the spatial interaction of the transient electric field induced by the TMS pulse with the cortical neurons is another contributor to variability...." One sees here that an enormous amount of material is presented into sentences that barely, if at all, catch the important gist of a concept, but move on to another poorly structured and overly general sentence which, after much reading, leads to no clear understanding of the topic. I must say, I have not read the entire book, yet. But, so far, it reads like sentences and paragrphs of the book were attempts to summarize research articles without a clear and overarching outlines of neurochemical mechanisms in question. This style results in a lack of coherence between sentences and paragraphs. This style was chosen over outlining a clear set of neurochemical pathways, writing a draft to explain that outline and using references to amplify the core outline. These are editorial errors that should not have escaped the reviewers.