We have long needed this book. Historically, most texts have either concentrated on describing the natural history of venomous organisms or the medical implactions of envemonations (a noteable exception is the excellent contributions by Halstead). This book provides a great deal of biological informtion about toxic marine organisms and then combines this with the latest information about medical treatments for envenomations. In addition, this book also contains an excellent reveiw and classification for cnidae, which I have personally been looking for for a while. I honestly can't say enough about this text. Although this book is not really for the layman (you won't find much in the way of popularized accounts of injuries), it is an EXCELLENT text for specialists.

This book presents the basic economic concepts behind daily activities on financial markets, such as stock price or exchange rate movement, and tries to explain the relations between them. It briefly introduces choice under uncertainty, risk aversion, portfolio optimization problems, market efficiency hypothesis, and equilibrium of asset markets. In addition, the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), and Arbitrage Pricing Theory (APT) are presented. It brings the most exciting part of academic evolution of financial economics in the last three decades to the pubic with modest knowledge of mathematics. It also shows the weakness of these theories. Very self-contained and readable. However, if you want to pursue a ground understanding of these theories, you should go further.

The intention behind this book was to provide a solid introduction and overview of financial economics and financial institutions. The authors suceed brilliantly in those goals. Most people with limited training in economics and mathematics should be able to understand the book (so, for example, this book would be great for early undergraduates or MBA students who have not been exposed to finance or economics).

I think there is enough information in this book to be of some use to even people who have more advanced training. Why? This book gives a good overview of both the theoretical (deductive proofs) and empirical (econometric) research that has been done on various topics (relatively up to date). The book tries to give a balanced view of the merits or problematics of any particular theory in financial economics.

This book deserves a 5 star rating rather than a 4 star one because for what it was intended to be -- a solid introduction and overview -- it does a superb job. It would be unfair to judge any book by some unintended higher standard when it does a great job at doing what it intended to do. Bottom line: If you need a good introduction to financial economics, this is a good place to start.

This book is a good overview of the investment banking business, although it is quite expensive. I would strongly recommend instead or in addition the Vault Career Guide to Investment Banking, which is available either on amazon or directly from vault.com. The Vault guide includes more detailed overviews of all the departments and functions of an investment
bank including corporate finance, M&A, sales, trading, private client services, credit, etc. If you are a job seeker in investment banking also try the Vault Guide to Finance Interviews, which contains actual investment banking finance interview questions and answers and which I found to be enormously valuable in my Wall Street job search.