Customer Reviews

Ground-Water Microbiology and Geochemistry

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I am a civil engineer involved in the removal of nitrogen from ground water and the environment. I find this text to be an invaluable resource. Many of our land use laws rely on regulations derived on the basis that chemistry is the biggest change maker in ground water. This book, in understandable English, proves that bacteria are the dominant force in the changes in ground water. I would highly recommend this book to any engineer or regulator that is involved in the removal of nitrogen from groundwater and the environment. In fact, I would say it is required reading for engineers and regulators

This second edition is just as full of typos as the first, an average of 1/page, from misuse of "it's" to alternation of the spelling of Monod (Monad), to slipping the superscript so 10^5 becomes 105. The illustrations are fine and clear, and subject to the same mispelling.
The author is with the USGeological Survey, which at least used to be a paragon of critical editing, and one had hoped for better proofing in this expansion of the widely used and acclaimed text. A book at this price that stands to be a long-lived authority should have received better.
The expansion is welcome, since geomicrobiology is advancing so fast that the first edition was already out of date. Much of the expansion is given to petroleum hydrocarbons (with a couple of pages on MTBE) and chlorinated solvents, some of which has again become dated since the second edition, already, some of which appears catering to school classes.
Some of the more mysterious questions of geomicrobiology are still avoided (e.g. how do microbes get into clayey deposits where pores are smaller than average bugs and pore throats are much smaller? did individuals get buried with the sediment and adapt to survive millions of years in virtual dormancy?). And Chapelle cannot quite bring himself to adopt the new divisions of Archaea and Bacteria, using the term bacteria to refer to both, in the old style, although he acknowledges the newer thinking.
Unfortunately, in such a small specialty, the existence of an authoritative edition discourages challengers, and we will no doubt wait another or ten years for another geomicrobiology text.
If you are thinking about this book as a reference, rather than a required text, you might look instead at the American Society for Microbiology's Manual of Environmental Microbiology, ed. Hurst, 1997, ASM Press. This is a collection of articles by 90 or so microbiologists that you can probably get used, is 900 p with considerably more breadth and depth than Chapelle, and is a bibliophile's delight. Chapelle has a section in Envir Microbio, which seems to be typo-free.
Envir Microbio also contains, for instance in a section on landfill processes, relatively extensive material on fermentation, which gets about a paragraph in Chapelle's book. Fermentation is very important in groundwater bioremediation, but typically gets short shrift because it is complicated and inefficient, and hard to track because it does not consume electron acceptors, and many of its products (typically acids) do not show up in traditional chemical analyses. Landfill engineers know a lot more about fermentation than geomicrobiologists.
Chapelle is also disappointing in not having stretched this edition to cover the budding discipline of isotopic fractionation in documenting microbial attenuation processes. To be sure, most of the published work using GC IRMS to separate and measure isotope ratios of individual organic compounds post-dates this second edition, but he must have been aware of these developments. He mentions some traditional isotopes to evidence evolution of some systems.

Chapelle's index is also skimpy. No page reference, for instance, for iron reducing bacteria, although he discusses them at some length, mentioning Geobacter chapelleii, named, deservedly, after himself.
But no scientific book goes as far as we would like down our special interests. Science literature is a work in progress, not a bible, and it is silly to expect The Book of Geomicrobiology & Geochemistry. I am not sending my Chapelle back.