Book excerpt: The design of mechanical structures with improved and predictable durability cannot be achieved without a thorough understanding of the mechanisms of fatigue damage and more specifically the relationships between the microstructure of materials and their fatigue properties. Written by leading experts in the field, this book (which is complementary to Fatigue of Materials and Structures: Application to Damage and Design, also edited by Claude Bathias and André Pineau), provides an authoritative, comprehensive and unified treatment of the mechanics and micromechanisms of fatigue in metals, polymers and composites. Each chapter is devoted to one of the major classes of materials or to different types of fatigue damage, thereby providing overall coverage of the field. The book deals with crack initiation, crack growth, low-cycle fatigue, gigacycle fatigue, shorts cracks, fatigue micromechanisms and the local approach to fatigue damage, corrosion fatigue, environmental effects and variable amplitude loadings, and will be an important and much used reference for students, practicing engineers and researchers studying fracture and fatigue in numerous areas of mechanical, structural, civil, design, nuclear, and aerospace engineering as well as materials science.