The inclusion of historical context and the author's experiences helps to give readers insight into how these techniques were developed and applied in practice. Overall, this book seems to provide a good overview of X-ray spectroscopy methods and their applications. B Book, "X-Ray Spectroscopy for Chemical State Analysis" (Jun Kawai, Springer, 2023) b Professor Jun Kawai (Kyoto University, Japan) has published an interesting and useful book on materials characterization methods using X-ray emission, absorption, and photoelectron spectroscopies.