The Kidney in Health and Disease, by Charles F. Geschickter and Tatiana T. Antonovych, 189 pp, 53 illus, paper, $8.75, Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1971.
In the first of these two volumes, a pathologist and a nephrologist have set out to give us a short nephrology text in which structure and function each receive their due. What they have achieved is a graceless, badly written book in which wooden sentences lie uneasily together like the boards in an ill-made floor. The authors have no ear for language, and worse, no editorial judgment in presentation of concepts. Major assertions, such as "renin... serves as a major humoral mechanism for the maintenance of blood pressure," are offered without qualifications. Not even renin enthusiasts, and I am one, believe that sentence. Again, we are told without hesitation that renoprival hypertension is due to the "loss of renal depressors." The remarks on treatment