Book excerpt: Metamorphic Textures provides definitions, descriptions and illustrations of metamorphic textures, as well as the fundamental processes involved in textural development. This book is composed of 11 chapters and begins with a presentation of the metamorphic processes and the production of metamorphic minerals. The subsequent chapters describe the structural classification of grain boundaries, the metamorphic reactions, mineral transformations, and the crystallization and recrystallization of metamorphic rocks. These topics are followed by the texture examination of thermal metamorphic rocks and minerals and the preferred orientations of these rocks, particularly the dimensional and lattice preferred orientation. Other chapters survey the textures of rocks under dynamic and shock metamorphism. The final chapters describe the textures of regional and polymetamorphism. This book will be of great use to petrologists, physicists, and graduate and undergraduate petrology students.