A few years ago, Pergamon Press published an International Handbook of Traumatic Stress Syndromes (Wilson & Raphael, 1993). A mammoth book, nearly 1000 quarto pages long, it included articles on nearly every aspect of these disorders – history, diagnosis, etiology, pathogenesis, treatment. The authors included many of the leading researchers in the PTSD field. Traumatic Stress covers much of the same ground, but it is comprehensive rather than encyclopedic, and its list of contributors is relatively short. Indeed, the editors (van der Kolk and MacFarlane) have authored or co-authored two-thirds of the chapters. In addition, several contributors are people with whom the editors have collaborated in the past. This gives Traumatic Stress a degree of coherence that is absent from the Handbook, but it is also a source of redundancy, notably in chapters that reiterate themes – concerning post-traumatic somatization, dissociation, and psychobiology – originally explored in van der Kolk’s widely cited article, ‘The Body Keeps Score’ (reprinted here). In addition, there are chapters on the history of the concept of psychogenic trauma, the methods and instruments currently used to assess post-traumatic disorders in clinical and research settings, and the historical development of classification schemes for post-traumatic disorders. These are valuable scholarly reviews and include useful bibliographies. Likewise, chapters on treatment modalities specific to acute and chronic forms of post-traumatic disorders are comprehensive and authoritative. A chapter on legal issues affecting these disorders is less successful, since it largely ignores the controversies and litigation surrounding evidence based on ‘recovered memory’ (Brown, Scheflin, & Hammond, 1998). Elsewhere in the book, van der Kolk refers to the passions that this subject arouses,