"The purpose of this manual is to help you learn the basic techniques of temporal bone surgery and to encourage practice in the steps needed to take basic surgical approaches to their fullest potential. It is our attempt to provide training surgeons a unique and very visual work that is designed to guide you in performing this challenging but intriguing surgery. A major difficulty with most surgical manuals is that the novice can feel bludgeoned with details that lack context. The text of a surgical manual needs to be translated into visual images in order to understand and apply it to a procedural technique. Also, primers can fail because they are so overwritten that the novice can feel hopelessly buried under an avalanche of information, much of which is only vaguely incidental to a firm grasp of the basics. This can confuse the issues and lead to frustration. Indeed, most surgeons learn how to operate in spite of the textbooks, rather than because of them"--Provided by publisher.