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.

Atlantic: Cobra II: the inside story of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, by Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor (2006, 603 pp, £25). Rev. by Hugh McManners, Sunday Times, 30 April 2006.

Unfortunately the index lists only names of people, omitting places and, most importantly, military units.

Boydell Press: William of Malmesbury, by Rodney M. Thomson (2003, xiii + 239 pp, £30). Rev. by Richard W. Pfaff, Antiquaries Journal, vol. 85, 2005.

The General Index (highly important in a volume consisting of originally disparate pieces) is a bit skimpy.

Brill (Leiden): Encyclopedia of women and Islamic culture, vol. 1: methodologies, paradigms and sources, ed. Suad Joseph (2003, 700 pp). Rev. by Larry Conradi, Der Islam, 82, 2005.

Finally, for such a broadly conceived work that is bound to be complex and difficult to use, the index is entirely inadequate. Professional standards of indexing suggest that a good index should be about a tenth of the size of the book it covers, and insist that long strings of numbers must be avoided — such strings reveal places where sub-entries need to be provided. The index to EWIC I is very short in comparison to the size of the volume, many important items have been missed out entirely, and quite a few entries bear long lists of page numbers. The indices [sic] to the Bibliography are far superior to those for the volume itself.

Cambridge University Press: The Cambridge companion to Homer, ed. by Robert Fowler (2004, 419 pp, £45 hbk, £18.99 pbk). Rev. by Richard Rutherford, Times Literary Supplement, 10 February 2006.

The book is full of good things, and it will be a rare scholar who does not find something new in the generous bibliography… The index is less carefully done, and some quite important entries (e.g. on Hesiod) are short-changed.

Cambridge University Press: The Cambridge Mozart encyclopaedia, ed. by Cliff Eisen and Simon P. Keefe (2006, 662 pp, £95). Rev. by Clifford Bartlett, Early Music Review, 111, February 2006.

The editors encourage readers to consult the index. That is, however, hard work, since entries are not subdivided. J. S. Bach is mentioned on 24 pages: it shouldn’t be necessary to look them all up if all one wants to find is whether the story of Mozart surrounding himself by parts of motets in St Thomas Leipzig is a myth. There are 17 lines of unsorted page-numbers for Leopold (or rather Johann Leopold George) Mozart. It’s a pity that more effort (and space) was not taken in maximising the uses to which this excellent encyclopaedia can be put.

Chandos Publishing Oxford: Knowledge management: an integrative approach, by Meliha Handzic and Albert Z. Zhou (2005, 172 pp, £57). Rev. by Mandy Webster, FreePint.

Some of the tables refer to case studies simply by name as illustrating a particular approach to KM, but it is difficult to then locate the case studies as some, but not all, are listed in the index. The index itself is too short at only two pages.

Chatto & Windus: The siege of Venice, by Jonathan Keates (2005, 512 pp, £20). Rev. by John Julius Norwich, BBC History Magazine, 7(1), January 2006.

My only quarrel is with the index: writing 30 or 40 page numbers one after the other with no indication of their reference is a gross dereliction of duty.

Clarendon Press (Oxford Historical Monographs Series): Modernizing nature: forestry and imperial eco-development 1800–1950, by S. Ravi Rajan (2006, 286 pp, £60). Rev. in Andrew Jones, Fine, scholarly and out-of-print books, Catalogue 145: History, June 2006.

When a good friend, in this case Anna, volunteers to compile your index, the proper answer is ‘No’: to those that have not played the game before, capital letters have a magnetic attraction — but such entries as ‘Asia’, ‘England’, ‘Prime Minister, British’ and ‘Lord Mayor of London’ serve no purpose; ‘Grey, Lord Earl’ suggests that we weren’t on nodding terms over a cup of tea with Albert or Sir Edward, and ‘Priestley, INITIALS’ is a despairing cry which Joseph did not answer. Does no-one at OUP check anything?

Faber: The selected letters of Michael Tippett, ed. by Thomas Schuttenhelm (2005, 400 pp, £25). Rev. by Hugh Wood, Times Literary Supplement, 10 March 2006.

The biographical index is woefully incomplete, and the page references are all over the place.

Haworth Information Press: Metadata: a cataloger’s primer, ed. by Richard P. Smiraglia (2005, 303 pp, £28.50). Rev. by J. H. Bowman, Library & Information Update, 5(7–8), July/August 2006.

In the index there are far too many undifferentiated page-references, for example, under Dublin Core, and clearly the compiler has never heard of ‘double-posting’, as there are numerous cross-references which take up far more space than inserting the relevant page numbers again would have done.

Horizon Bio-Science: Microbe-host interface in respiratory tract infections, ed. by Jan L.L. Kimpen and Octavio Ramilo (2005, 340 pp, £85). Rev. by W. Conrad Liles, Respiratory Care, March 2006.

The overall appeal of this book is diminished by a number of curious omissions and deficiencies. Despite the well-recognized and critical role of dendritic cells in the host response to pulmonary pathogens, the term ‘dendritic cell’ is not in the index, and dendritic cells are not specifically discussed in the text. [‘In other words,’ comments Carolyn Weaver, who sent this item, ‘the index is criticized for not including what the author omitted. Which supports my contention that cross-references are among the
most important elements in index usability. I’d love to see this book just to find out if dendritic cells are truly omitted, or actually discussed using different terminology.’]

Journal of the Kerry Historical and Archaeological Society. Rev. by John Bradley, Archaeology Ireland, 19(4), winter 2005.

Two issues … have appeared during the past year, both up to its usual high standards and particularly commendable for the inclusion of an index, a feature that was once a commonplace but which the Kerry Journal is now the only one to uphold.

Jessica Kingsley: Goodbye Mr Wonderful: alcoholism, addiction and early recovery, by Chris McCully (2004, 237 pp, £13.95). Rev. by Lindsey Coombes, Community Practitioner, 79(3), March 2006.

I did not always find the index very helpful (if the reader looks up ‘cannabis’ for example they will find that this is linked to a short statement on page 77 that ‘the personal use of cannabis has effectively been de-criminalised’). [So what’s wrong with that?]

William Morrow: The great deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast, by Douglas Brinkley (2006, 716 pp, $29.95). Rev. by Dante Ramos, Los Angeles Times, 7 May 2006.

Even the book’s index is tendentious. The entry for ‘Nagin, Ray’ lists such subtopics as ‘abandonment of New Orleans by,’ ‘breakdown of,’ ‘mistakes and failures of,’ ‘paranoia of,’ ‘personal responsibility and guilt of’ and ‘special-needs residents neglected by.’

Oxford University Press: Bombay to Bloomsbury: a biography of the Strachey family, by Barbara Caine (2005, 506 pp, £25). Rev. by Sarah H. Hall and Lynne Newland, Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain Bulletin, 21 January 2006.

Gerald Brenan is misspelled ‘Brennan’ in the index; and there are three differently-spelled variants of Alix Sargant-Florence (pp. 2, 140, in the family tree, and in the index), although her brother is spelled and hyphenated correctly…. We are sorry to have to mention the book’s faults, as we liked it very much, and were prepared to forgive the author because of the vast amount of material she had to marshal in the process of her research. She might have been justified, moreover, in expecting the copyeditor,
proofreader or indexer to pick up some of the inconsistencies and repetitions during the process of editing.

Oxford University Press: J. D. Bernal: the sage of science, by Andrew Brown (2005, 576 pp, £25). Rev. by Gordon Fraser, Physics World, February 2006.

One pity is that the index is incomplete, which is unfortunate for a book that provides such valuable material on the history of science in the 20th century.

Oxford University Press: The syringe driver: continuous subcutaneous infusions in palliative care, by Andrew Dickman, Jennifer Schneider and James Varga (2nd edn, 2006, 176 pp, £24.95). Rev. by Suzanne Hammond, International Journal of Palliative Nursing, 11(11), 2005.

I found the index to the second edition somewhat less user-friendly than the first edition, e.g. there was no direct index entry for ‘diluent’ or ‘site irritation’ in the later edition.

Oxford University Press: Writers, readers and reputations, by Philip Waller (2006, 1181 pp, £85). Rev. by A. N. Wilson, The Spectator, 17 June 2006.

One other cavil, and a more serious one. Oxford University Press should pay someone to make a much more detailed index. There are over 40 references to Thackeray, for example, some where he is mentioned in passing and others rich in anecdote, such as his wanting to have corn-sheaves carved by the front door of his house in Kensington (now the Israeli embassy) which he built from the profits of being editor of the Cornhill Magazine. (He barely lived to see the house completed.)

Penguin: The secret life of trees, by Colin Tudge (2006, 464 pp, £8.99). Rev. by Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian, 8 July 2006.

A wonderful book, if a pity that Penguin didn’t put more effort into the index. [What was wrong with it? More information, please.]

Routledge: The Guy Liddell diaries, ed. by Nigel West (2 vols, £50). Rev. by M. R. D. Foot, The Spectator, 19 November 2005.

… of enormous interest for their context – Liddell was MI5’s wartime head of counter-espionage – even if their indexer thought Neville Chamberlain was still alive in 1941.

Weidenfeld & Nicolson: Yiddish civilisation: the rise and fall of a forgotten nation, by Paul Kriwaczek (2006, 347 pp, £25). Rev. by Joseph Sherman, Times Literary Supplement, 24 February 2006.

Index and citations are wholly inadequate. A quotation from Rashi is identified only as ‘Rashi: responsa no. 159’, while the source of a fiat from Elizabeth I’s foreign secretary Walsingham is named only as ‘English State Papers’.