Douglas E. Soltis, Pamela S. Soltis (both: U. of Florida-Gainesville), Peter K. Endress (U. of Zurich), and Mark W. Chase (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew) synthesize the new understanding of the phylogeny of flowering plants that has emerged over the past decade. They also illustrate the effect that this phylogenetic framework has on interpreting character evolution. In addition to particular taxonomic groups, they look at classification, parallel and convergent evolution, floral diversification, and the evolution of genome size and base chromosome number. Annotation ©2005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)