Back in the early 1960s, when the curtain was falling on British colonial administration in Africa, the newly-created Ministry of Overseas Development decided to gather together for posterity the expertise and experience of authorities on tsetse and trypanosomiasis control. Weighing in at three and a half pounds, the resulting publication, ‘The African Trypanosomiases’ edited by Colonel Hugh Mulligan and published in 1969, has since been a baseline not only for investigators in the field but also for pure scientists working on related problems at the laboratory bench. The editors of the present volume were inspired by the enormous progress made in trypanosomiasis research over the last thirty years to produce ‘an update of Mulligan’ – so, how do the two books compare? Well, amazingly, their weights are exactly the same – but content and coverage are, as might be expected, very different.