I was extremely intrigued when the JLO Reviews Editor Liam Flood asked me to review a 115-page book on ‘Ear Surgery’ by an eminent otologist, especially when it came with six DVDs. My perennial complaint has been that most books I have read had too many words and too few pictures.

This book has 13 chapters, with the six DVDs covering 11 of them. It was only when I started playing the first DVD that I began to get the ‘let down’ feeling that I get all too often, working in the NHS. The quality of the DVD was extremely poor (single chip camera pictures), although the accompanying commentary was quite interesting. I must confess that I did wonder if my monitor was playing up, and it was only when I put in a DVD from the Causse Clinic that my anxiety was allayed.

The first chapter on the DVD was on otosclerosis. The patient example was from 1967, and it showed. I suspect someone has trawled through Richard Gacek's library and collected representative cases. The book is designed to go with the cases in his collection, a case of the tail wagging the dog; this would explain why there are five pages on cholesteatoma surgery but 10 pages on petrous apex lesions.

I think that the principle upon which this book is based is excellent but the execution is poor. I look forward to the day when Liam Flood hands me a textbook on ear surgery (rather than an atlas) that truly has more pictures than words.