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There is a clear need for a textbook of nephrology which is brief, simple, interesting and accurate. Dr. Berlyne scores high on the first two and low on the second two. The virtues of this programmed text are compactness and choice of material. Most of the important subjects in nephrology are covered within a short space, and much of the material is timely and well summarized. Unfortunately, both form and content are open to criticism. The question and answer format often suffers in this book from overly simple and uninteresting questions. The two or three answers from which to choose are not very challenging. An equally serious criticism concerns factual inaccuracies and unqualified, dogmatic answers to some very controversial points. To illustrate, it is possible to directly contradict the author as follows:
The width of the glomerular basement membrane in the human is 2,800 Angstoms (A), not 1,200 A (page