Evan Begg. Auckland: Adis Books; 2000.
Price $22.95 (84 pages)
This is a very useful short book which lives up to its name. It is divided into 32 topics, each topic being covered in two opposing pages. The list of topics fully covers clinical pharmacology, although the formula of two pages per topic results in some topics being covered in a little more or less detail than others. The selection of the topics is also a little arbitrary, and has clearly been determined to a significant extent by the requirement of two pages per topic.
It should be noted that this is not a textbook of therapeutics, nor is it a textbook of pharmacology. It bridges the gap between those two disciplines by covering such topics as drug clearance, the half-life, dosing in renal impairment, drug interactions, and compliance with medications.
This book should be very useful for undergraduate medical and pharmacy students, and also for postgraduate trainees in disciplines such as internal medicine and anaesthetics. I highly recommend it.
