Norkin (emeritus, microbiology, U. of Massachusetts) justifies his production of a new textbook introducing the field of virology to advanced undergraduate and graduate students in reference to three reasons: the importance of discussing viruses in the context of virus families; the need to view virus families within the Baltimore classification system (based on the different strategies used by viruses to express their genomes, which determine expression strategy), which is a key unifying theme of the text and an approach that enables students to assume basic facts about the replication strategy of a virus based on the nature of its genome; and the benefits of uniformly organized chapters and a consistent writing style. Covering primarily animal viruses, the text's 22 chapters discuss the history of virus research, virus classification, modes of virus infection and disease, host defenses and viral countermeasures, virus replication and pathogenesis for certain double and single stranded RNA and DNA viruses (the majority of the chapters), and oncogenes and HIV. Annotation ©2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)