This monumental work is designed to be a companion volume to Wilford, Coghlin and Kimball’s Time Charters (3rd edn, 1989). It has the same structure as its companion: the text is presented as a commentary on two of the most widely used standard form charterparties, with an account of the English law preceding a generally shorter account of the American law. The six authors (four British, two from the United States) wisely chose the 1976 version of the Gencon form to be the main basis of the book because of its widespread use, although they express some diffidence about that choice in the light of Harman, L.J.’s comments in Louis Dreyfus & Cie v. Parnaso Cia Naviera S.A. [1960] 2 Q.B. 49, 53 (“Those responsible for the ‘Gencon’ form of charter should not continue to put ‘Recommended’ at the top of it. It is a ghastly document.”) There is also a shorter commentary on the Asbatankvoy form, in recognition of the fact that the oil tanker trade is both important in this area of the law and, in some respects, idiosyncratic.

There can be no complaints about the substance of the work. The book maintains a tone of measured authoritativeness throughout its considerable length. Like its companion volume, Time Charters, it builds up the reader’s understanding gradually but effectively, by illustrating its description and analysis of the law with brief synopses of relevant cases, set in a smaller font. Where there is a conflict of authority on a particular point, the authors take sides calmly but firmly, drawing on their considerable practical experience. (Because the Preface does not indicate which author wrote which part, the authors must be taken to be assuming collective responsibility for the whole, though the English authors presumably wrote about the English law and the American authors about the American law.) Although the prose seems tolerably clear and direct to a lawyer (or to this lawyer, at least), it may seem rather more obscure to the shipowners, charterers, brokers, agents and claims adjusters whom the authors hope will be included in the readership.

However, although the substance is well-nigh impeccable, the structure and content leave something to be desired. The technique of commentary following text is both one of the book’s great strengths and, paradoxically, its greatest weakness. The practitioner with a typical practical problem, the interpretation of a clause in a charterparty, can simply turn to the relevant pages and find all that he or she needs marshalled together there. Even so, the book is inevitably more helpful for those dealing with Gencon or Asbatankvoy charterparties than those dealing with cases involving other standard forms. Although the book reproduces five standard form voyage charters apart from Gencon and Asbatankvoy, it does not contain any cross-references to those forms, or to any others. In a book that is destined to be used as a reference source, it would be useful if there were some kind of table of equivalents, or even simply a list of equivalent clauses before each section of commentary.

When one moves from textual analysis to important topics that have no natural “home” in the text of the Gencon or Asbatankvoy forms, the clause-by-clause structure of text and commentary