From the reviews: "In the book under review the authors pursue three chief goals: to give a comprehensive overview of existing compactifications ... to explain the relations among them and to provide a uniform construction. ... The style is user-friendly ... . It can be highly recommended and will be very useful to anyone, graduate student or research mathematician, interested in the geometry and topology of (locally) symmetric spaces."(Enrico Leuzinger, Mathematical Reviews, Issue 2007 d)