Dr. Hideo Takezoe is one of the discoverers of antiferroelectric liquid crystals and polar switching in bent-shaped liquid crystals. Due to his wide-area of achievement in such fields, he has received many awards, such as the Humboldt Research Award (2013) and Freederiksz medal (2014). He has been an honored member of the International Liquid Crystal Society since 2012.Dr. Alexey Eremin is one of the discoverers of the orthogonal antiferroelectric smectic phase formed by bent-shaped molecules. For his achievements on bent-shaped liquid crystals, he was awarded the Glenn Brown Prize of the International Liquid Crystal Society and the Otto Lehman Award of the Otto-Lehman-Stiftung at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.

• Chapter 1: IntroductionChapter 2: Theories of bent-shaped liquid crystalsChapter 3: Phase StructuresChapter 4: Peculiarities of the N phasesChapter 5: Chirality in bent-shaped mesogensChapter 6: Nonlinear optics in bent-shaped mesogens Chapter 7: Banana Phases in Restricted GeometriesChapter 8: Mixing effect in bent-shaped mesogens Chapter 9: Application of bent-shaped mesogens

In scope and presentation, the current text is a timely and comprehensive addition to the ever growing ‘liquid crystal library’. Bent-Shaped Liquid Crystals was one of the books that was still missing, while the field has matured enough to go beyond a simple review article. The two authors have put in considerable effort to collect detailed material to cover the whole of the field, which is also reflected by the numerous references provided. In conclusion, this book can be warmly recommended to anyone who is involved in the field of bent-core phases, or who wants to get a first overview of this aspect of liquid crystal research. I certainly enjoyed reading through the text, which is also illustrated with a lot of very good and informative schematic figures.-Ingo Dierking, for Liquid Crystals Today, vol. 27