Book excerpt: The 4th International Symposium on the Science and Technology of Sintering was held on 4-6 November 1987 in Tokyo. Among the many technical sessions was one entitled 'Session for Sintering-Case Study'. Over 200 participants heard these invited talks. Although some papers were over 20 years old, it is necessary to understand the authors' way of thinking. Since the end of the Second World War, many excellent papers related to sintering have appeared in many different academic journals. Some of these papers are still of value, and are still being read by today's students. The questions we have to ask are: Why does the scholar think this way? Why did the scholar perform his experiments? What is the mechanism of sintering? What is the liquid phase of sintering? What is the behavior of sintering additives? What is the history and development of sintering theory? This book includes these sort of historical papers and also new original papers on sintering, all of which are very important to our understanding of the subject. Several papers have been added for this English edition, which is thus more comprehensive than its Japanese counterpart. These papers were spread out in many different sources and the benefits of collecting them together in book form is obvious.