When I was a resident considering a fellowship in oncology, no comprehensive textbook reviewed the state of knowledge about the biology and treatment of cancer. Happily, several excellent books, usually edited and written by multidisciplinary teams of experts and organized into general concepts and tumor site-specific sections, have since appeared to fill this void. Clinical Oncology is a new member of this genre, which already includes Cancer: Principles and Practice of Oncology (DeVita et al., eds.), The Oxford Textbook of Oncology (Peckham et al., eds.), and Cancer Medicine (Holland, ed.). These books are all unwieldy (about 2500 pages), comprehensive and multidisciplinary in scope, and in the same price range ($200.00 to $290.00). The question then is, Where does Clinical Oncology fit into the hierarchy of these texts for different categories of potential users?

Overall, it is an excellent book: well organized, well written, uniformly readable, and of consistent quality and format for a comprehensive multiauthor text. One unique feature, valuable for the practitioner, is the incorporation into each chapter of highlighted, recommended diagnostic and treatment algorithms for each clinical problem or type of cancer. Another useful aspect is the chapter summary at the beginning of each chapter, which makes it easier to read and follow the chapter and to find discussions of specific points. The chapters devoted to reviewing specific problems in clinical oncology, such as malignant effusions, hypercalcemia, carcinomatous meningitis, and metastases in various sites, are of higher quality than those in other texts. The book is both well referenced and reasonably priced.

Clinical Oncology is not without significant shortcomings. For a comprehensive textbook of cancer medicine, it contains surprisingly little information about the pharmacology of chemotherapeutic and immunotherapeutic agents. In this respect, it is inferior to other texts. This deficiency makes the book less useful to the practitioner and the trainee and is exacerbated by the omission (common to most of the comprehensive texts) of a userfriendly listing of the doses and schedules of commonly used chemotherapy regimens. For some cancers, regimen specifics are written into the text of the relevant chapter; for others, they are not. It would be difficult to care for patients with cancer by using this book as a source of specific information. This is a serious problem for some of the book's potential readers, but not for experienced subspecialists or scientists engaged in translational research who need well-written and thorough expositions of the available knowledge about current cancer treatment.

Clinical Oncology is not unique in content, organization, or quality. It joins the upper echelons of its genre as an alternative to the best of the already available texts. The reader may find the discussions in individual chapters marginally better or not quite as good as those in other comprehensive books but will conclude that, overall, Clinical Oncology is more similar to than different from other quality texts of similar length, scope, and price. Subspecialists and cancer researchers will find the book as informative as, less expensive than, and easier to read than Cancer: Principles and Practice of Oncology; they will probably not find it advantageous to own both books. Primary care physicians, fellows, residents, and students will find much of interest in Clinical Oncology, and they will find this book more user-friendly than the other comprehensive texts (none, however, is ideal for these readers). Nonsubspecialists who want to invest in a substantial oncology text should consider a less exhaustive, more succinct and utilitarian book, such as Cancer Treatment (Haskell, ed., 1100 pages, $149.00) or Medical Oncology (Calabresi et al., eds., 1350 pages, $148.00), which may better fit both their budgets and their need for complete, compact discussions and convenient, practical clinical information.