Indexes Praised and Indexes Censured are extracted from Indexes Reviewed, a regular feature in The Indexer.

These extracts from reviews do not pretend to represent a complete survey of all reviews in journals and newspapers. We offer only a selection from quotations that members have sent in. Our reproduction of comments is not a stamp of approval from the Society of Indexers upon the reviewer’s assessment of an index.

Boydell Press: A history of Ely Cathedral, ed. Peter Meadows and Nigel Ramsay (£29.95). Rev. by Nicholas Orme, Church Times, 6 February 2004.
The format is more constrained than that of some other chapters, since it does not give chapters to the monuments, estates, educational institutions, or relationships with the town. These and other matters are discussed during the course of the book, but it is not always easy to find the topics, because the index does not classify them in their own right, but lists them under a few major headings in the order in which they appear in the book. The frustration of this reviewer, trying to search for ‘education’ and the ‘Peasants’ Revolt’, for example, bodes ill for those who consult the book, as opposed to just browsing through it.

Cambridge University Press: The Orient on the Victorian stage, by Edward Ziter (246 pp, £45). Rev. by Robert Irwin, Times Literary Supplement, 30 April 2004.
Neither Alexandria nor the Panopticon features in a rather unsatisfactory index.

Centre for Information Studies, Charles Sturt University (Wagga Wagga, NSW): Organising knowledge in a global society: principles and practice in libraries and information centres, by Ross Harvey and Philip Hider (2003, 375 pp, A$71.50, about £29). Rev. by J. H. Bowman, Library & Information Update, 3(7–8), July/August 2004.
The index could be better; some cross-references should have been turned into double entries, and others are missing (e.g. from ‘Metadata’ to ‘Dublin Core’).

Chatto and Windus: Just law: the changing face of justice – and why it matters to us all, by Helena Kennedy (356 pp, £20). Rev. by Michael Beloff, Times Literary Supplement, 2 April 2004.
The index is capricious, even discriminatory, allowing a cross-check on Harold Wilson the Prime Minister, but not Harold Wilson the circuit judge, both of whom are mentioned in the text.

Churchill Livingstone: Forfar & Arneil’s textbook of pediatrics (6th edn), ed. N. McIntosh, P. J. Helms and R. L. Smyth (2003, 1985 pp, £150). Rev. by Timothy Lachlan Chambers, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 97, February 2004.
Take, for example, single umbilical artery. A distinguished retired paediatrician telephoned me, concerned about his grandfetus [is this a recognized medical term?] which had been found through antenatal scanning to be one umbilical artery short. I scrutinized the index of the new Forfar & Arneil (F&A): try single – no; try artery – no. Try the index of the current Nelson Textbook (same publishing stable, cheaper, American) – yes, on page 528, a concise informative paragraph. Try Google – nearly 1300 citations, reproducible instantly on my printer and no heavy book to balance on the knees. The moral? The talents of editors and contributors might be put to better use in more contemporary information transfer.

Continuum: Edward Schillebeeckx: a theologian in his history, by Erik Borgman (£30). Rev. by Peter Phillips, The Tablet, 21 February 2004.
The index is inadequate: a brief, sometimes incomplete, index of personal names is just not sufficient. Though the notes are good, a detailed subject index and bibliography of Schillebeeckx’ work from this period is an essential tool for a volume like this. This is something that might be corrected in the second volume to which I look forward.

Fayard (Paris): La cinéphilie: invention d’un regard, histoire d’une culture, 1944–1968, by Antoine de Bacque (405 pp, 22). Rev. by Robin Buss, Times Literary Supplement, 23 January 2004.
. . . the index to Antoine de Bacque’s study of French cinephilia has a mere two references to Malle (compared with fifty-eight to Godard, some of them several pages long); and the object of one of those two references turns out to be not the film director [Louis Malle] but an old trunk (‘une vieille malle’), lazy computer indexing compounding the insult of neglect.

Fourth Estate: Ring road, by Ian Sansom (388 pp, £12.99). Rev. by Francis King, The Spectator, 10 April 2004.
A preliminary riffle through the novel is not all that encouraging. Three pages of spoof Acknowledgments (‘some of them are dead; most of them are strangers; the famous are not friends’) range from Graham Swift to Jonathan Swift and from Stevie Wonder to Ralph Vaughan Williams. There is a spoof Preface and a spoof 19-page index of ‘Key Words, Phrases and Concepts’ of absolutely no use even to a reviewer in a hurry. . . . Facetiousness is fine at a dinner party, in a pub or in Private Eye. But on this scale in a novel it not only ceases to amuse but becomes exasperating.

HarperCollins: The earth: an intimate history, by Richard Fortey (2004, 477 pp, £25). Rev. by Robert Hanks, Daily Telegraph, 6 March 2004.
I found myself longing for a glossary of geological terms and a few more maps (at the very least, a more thorough index would have allowed me to retrace my steps more easily).

Haworth Information Press: Reference services: issues and trends, ed. Stacey Kimmel and Jennifer Heise (2003, 194 pp, $29.95). Rev. by Amanda Duffy, Library & Information Update, 3(3), March 2004.
Reading this book will save you time if you are thinking about how to set up a virtual reference service, and also make you consider other aspects of your reference and information service along the way. The index, however, is hard work. [In what way?]

Hodder & Stoughton: The River Cottage meat book, by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (544 pp, £25). Rev. by Felicity Lawrence, Guardian, 19 June 2004.
Favourites are also revisited – you’ll find an excellent bolognese (despite the index’s best efforts to hide it) . . .

Iowa State Press: External fixation in small animal practice, byK. H. Kraus and J. P. Toombs (2003, 233 pp, $127.99). Rev. by Greg Harasen, Canadian Veterinary Journal, 45, February 2004.
In addition, the index is inadequate consisting of barely 2/3 of a page.

Macmillan: Inside Hitler’s bunker, by Joachim Fest (190 pp, £16.99). Rev. by Noble Frankland, The Spectator, 24 April 2004.
. . . unfortunately, the index is far from adequate.

Manchester University Press: Leos Carax, by Fergus Daly and Garin Dowd (188 pp, £9.99). Rev. by Robin Buss, Times Literary Supplement, 13 February 2004.
If there is a director with whom Carax is to be compared, it is . . . the exiled Chilean baroque master Raoul Ruiz. The name of Ruiz occurs in page after page – far more often than the dozen references in the index, which must have been compiled by a very lazy computer.

Mason Crest: Childcare worker and Special education teacher, by Ellyn Sanna (2003, 90p each). Rev. by Beth Jones, School Library Journal, February 2003.
The glossaries and indexes are somewhat minimal.

Oxford University Press: The collected letters of A. W. N. Pugin, Vol 2, 1843–1845, ed. Margaret Belcher (515 pp, £80). Rev. by Robert Hewison, Times Literary Supplement, 17 October 2004.
It is to be hoped that the final volume will have a more detailed index . . .

Parthenon: An atlas of diseases of the nail, by P. Rich and R. Scher (104 pp, £59.99). Rev. by Celia Moss, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, vol. 97, April 2004.
Those keen to differentiate onychorrhexis, onychauxis and onychocryptosis (caused by ‘faulty biomechanics in the elderly’) would want more facts. It is impossible to look them up because the index, at least in my copy, stops abruptly and mysteriously at N (for nail).

Pimlico: George Crabbe: an English life 1754–1832, by Neil Powell (372 pp, £12.50). Rev. by Alan Hollingshurst, Guardian, 24 April 2004.
His biography has no illustrations, no maps, and one of those unbearable indexes which says, for instance, ‘Burke, Edmund’ followed by a list of 32 page numbers.

Profile: Heloise and Abelard: a twelfth-century love story, by James Burge (301 pp, £16.99). Rev. by Gillian Tindall, Times Literary Supplement, 9 January 2004.
Also, this nicely produced book (proper bibliography, the right maps and pictures) has an oddly feeble index.

Psychology Press: Statistics for the behavioural sciences: an introduction, by R. Russo (2003, 242 pp, £9.95). Rev. by Michael F. W. Festing, Animal Welfare, 2004, 13: 251–259.
Chapter 4 deals largely with the binomial distribution, starting with examples of coin tossing and the rolling of dice. Interestingly, the null hypothesis is introduced here on p. 71 although in the index the first mention of it is on p. 88.

WB Saunders: Zoo and wild animal medicine (5th edn), by Murray E. Fowler and Eric Miller (2003, 992 pp, $129). Rev. by Jennifer N. Langan, Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, 224(6), March 15, 2004.
The book is organised extremely well, but the index could have been expanded. In some cases, important information, such as ivermectin toxicosis in chelonians, may be difficult to find.

Scarecrow: Victorian horizons: the reception of the picture books of Walter Crane, Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway, by Anne Lundin (2001, 296 pp, £57). Rev. by Diana Dixon, Library & Information Update, 3(1), January 2004.
Scholars will be disappointed by the limitations of its index.

Weidenfeld & Nicolson: Hitler’s Mediterranean gamble, by Douglas Porch (£25, 794 pp). Rev. by Noble Frankland, The Spectator, 17 July 2004.
In a book of 683 pages with another 111 devoted to source references and index, it would be surprising if no defects were noticeable. In this case there are a few. The index is inadequate. The maps are miserable . . .