With around 200 colour illustrations, The Complete Ice Age is aimed at a fairly popular market but also a scientifically literate readership. The ‘Ice Age’ in question is, of course, the Late Cenozoic phase of climate change with warm and cold stages, commonly known as ‘The Ice Age’. Brian Fagan and his coauthors cover a wide range of ‘Ice Age’ related topics from the history of discovery, the initiation and development of the climate cycle to the astronomical parameters and causes of ice ages in the first half of the book. The second half is devoted to the impact of these climate changes on human evolution and animal life over the last two million years, followed by a brief section on the Holocene and another on future developments. Inevitably in a book of this kind, much of the emphasis is on the northern hemisphere.

The contributors are all academics working in relevant fields: John Hoffecker is at the University of Colorado's Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, Mark Maslin is Professor of Geography at University College London, Hannah O'Regan researches Quaternary mammals at Liverpool John Moores University and Brian Fagan is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

The Complete Ice Age is a complementary volume to the same publishers’ The Complete World of Human Evolution by Chris Stringer and Peter Andrews; indeed it reuses quite a lot of the graphics and illustrations from that book. Nevertheless, The Complete Ice Age is a visually pleasing and interesting introduction to the subject for the non-specialist and a useful text at the first-year student level. It has a good index and an up-to-date list of ‘Further Reading’, although the references are primarily to other books and so the student will have to go another step to get at the primary sources.