"The Legal Language of Terrorism" went in and out of print so quickly that there is only one other review published on Amazon, and that too is from a NetGalley reader. As of this writing, new copies are offered at $186, although the publisher seems to be offering them at $45 online.

I like dictionaries and tend to pick them up at used book sales. The thematic approach that Mr. Gallegos chose here is interesting because the entries build on each other. The book is not in alphabetical order.

Mr. Gallegos's thematic dictionary eliminates a lot of drudgery. Think of it this way. If you look up a term on the Internet you will get a series of definitions written by different people. You can read through them to get an idea of what is meant, but perhaps some writers aren't as precise as others or use a slightly different base vocabulary or come at the problem from a different angle. Or worse, your search turns up huge swaths of text that you don't have time to read, parse, and assimilate.

Here, the text is concise, a few paragraphs for each entry. It is written by the same team and edited by Mr. Gallegos. The writers use the same vocabulary and perspective and the entries build on each other. This means you can read and assimilate the concepts very quickly and then sit back to decide what to make of the information.

The other reviewer wanted the book as a source of legal precedents and I agree with her that it is not good for that. But I think the book might be a very good reference for an author embarking on a series of war novels with complex political and military themes. Read this one book and get the background of your novel correct from the beginning.

If you can get it for $45, go for it. Don't try it in electronic form, if someone tries to pass you a .pdf. You want to be able to read the book through and then go back later and find the entries you need. A digital copy isn't searchable because so many entries used the same vocabulary. You need a physical book to flip through quickly, allowing memory of how the themes are arranged to guide your search.

I received a review copy of "The Legal Language of Terrorism: A Thematic Dictionary" edited by Cuauhtémoc Gallegos (Merl Publications) through NetGalley.com. For this review I tried to find out something about Mr. Gallegos, the editor. That didn't work very well. Mr. Gallegos enjoys his privacy. There is no information on him at all, other than he has edited two dictionaries published by Marl Books, based in Bellingham, WA. ( )