book review: voles and lemmings (arvicolinae) of the palaearctic region. boris kryštufek and georgy i. shenbrot. 2022. university of maribor, university press. 436 pp.

The book by boris kryštufek and georgy i. shenbrot, published a few weeks ago, is an encyclopaedic masterpiece and up-to-date standard work on the rodent group of arvicolinae gray, 1821 (voles and lemmings) belonging to the family cricetidae fischer, 1817 (hamsters). the authors are two experts on these mammals, and are known worldwide by scientists working in mammalogy for their publications. in addition to countless individual articles, b. kryštufek is best known for his monograph on the ‘mammals of turkey and cyprus’, which he published together with vladimír vohralík (kryštufek and vohralík, 2001; 2005; 2009). georgy shenbrot wrote, among many other books and papers, mainly devoted to desert and steppe rodents, ‘an atlas of the geographic distribution of the arvicoline rodents’ in co-operation with boris krasnov (shenbrot and krasnov, 2005). it is certainly no exaggeration to call the present book, reviewed here, a worthy, up-to-date successor to hinton’s classic ‘monograph of voles and lemmings’ (hinton, 1926) and gromov and polyakov’s volume on ‘voles (microtinae)’ (gromov and polyakov, 1977) in the framework of the ‘fauna sssr’ series (which actually always represented the entire group worldwide). so, one can say that a fundamental work on voles appears about every 50 years.