© The Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew 2007. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 198 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA BOOK REVIEW Flowering Plant Families of the World by V. H. Heywood, R. K. Brummitt, A. Culham and O. Seberg. 2007. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. 424pp. ISBN 1 84246 165 5. £27.95 (currently £25.00 from www. kewbooks.org). This, the successor to Flowering Plants of the World (1978), has been awaited by many, including myself, who enjoyed and benefited from the original version. As an undergraduate student and beyond, that version has been a constant feature on my bookshelf and shows the signs of ample (or even excessive) use. In the almost thirty years since the first publication, angiosperm classifica- tion has been revolutionised at different levels ranging from relationships between orders and assignment of families to orders down to clarification of species boundaries. This revolution results from major advances in technology in fields including biochemistry and molecular biology. Many previously enig- matic families have been placed to order and problems in assigning genera to families have been largely overcome. This enabled the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group (APG 1998) to publish a novel framework of orders and their component families. As more taxa have become available for phylogenetic study, additional clarification has been made possible resulting in a second, updated version of the APG system (APG II 2003) and a book based on the system by Soltis et al. (2005). A major change from previous systems of classification was the collaborative nature of APG, including a mix of molecular systematists and classically trained botanists. The APG system is now widely accepted and used in fields outside systematics including ecology, evolutionary biology and genomics due to the increased predictivity it allows. Given this new framework, the time was ripe for an update of Flowering Plants of the World based on this modern synthesis. In the new version, Heywood et al. have taken on much of the APG system, but have chosen to deviate from it substantially in certain groups, in what could be seen to be a retrograde step back to a system based on the views of one or a few “experts” (see Soltis et al. 2005). How does the new version compare to the old? Many features of the old version remain, with lavish, mostly high-quality illustrations of many families, distribution maps and information relating to economic uses. The new version is a mine of information, and all these features ensure that it will be as popular as the original. I am sure that it will be widely used by botanists and others interested in plants. Some aspects of the book are, however, not what I expected. One imme- diately obvious difference is the order of the families. In the original, the families followed a systematic order based on that of Stebbins (1974). In this new version, the families are presented in alphabetical order firstly within the dicotyledons, followed by the monocotyledons, despite the fact that it is now well established that the dicotyledons do not form a natural group distinct from the monocotyledons. The use of alphabetical order facilitates finding a particular family, but it leaves the reader moving around the book tracking