What This Book Actually Is and Who It Helps
Appleton Lange Review Of Pharmacology Joseph J Krzanowski is a question bank and review companion for pharmacology courses. It's not a primary textbook. You won't learn drug mechanisms from its pages the way you would from Katzung or Goodman & Gilman. What you get is hundreds of practice questions, mostly multiple choice, covering the kind of material that shows up on pharmacology exams in pharmacy and medical programs. The author, Joseph J. Krzanowski, wrote this specifically to fill the gap between dense textbook material and the format students actually face during testing. The questions range from basic mechanism recall to clinical application scenarios. It's decent for that purpose, though it has some structural weaknesses that trip people up if they don't expect them.
Appleton Lange Review Of Pharmacology Joseph J Krzanowski
How It's Organized
The book is split into system-based sections. Cardiovascular, central nervous system, endocrine, antimicrobials, and so on. Each section opens with a brief content review, usually two to five pages at most, followed by a set of questions. The answers come with explanations, which is where the real value sits. The review portions are summaries, not deep dives. If you've already read your textbook cover to cover, those summaries are useful for quick recall. If you're starting from zero, you'll find yourself flipping back to Katzung constantly anyway. Each question has five options unless noted otherwise. The explanations for correct answers tend to be one to three sentences long, and sometimes that's enough. Other times they're frustratingly thin, especially on mechanisms that involve complex second messenger pathways or receptor subtype pharmacology.
How to Use It Effectively
Don't treat it as a reading assignment. The questions are the product. Work through them actively. Read the question, commit to an answer before looking at the explanation, and if you get it wrong, go directly to the relevant section in your textbook and read it properly. The mistake is assuming that re-reading the explanation alone is enough to fix a gap in understanding. It isn't. The explanation tells you what the right answer is. It rarely teaches you the underlying concept from scratch. I'd recommend doing the questions in small batches. Eight to twelve at a time, then reviewing immediately. Doing forty questions straight and checking answers at the end creates a false sense of competence because you're not consolidating the corrections into memory in real time. Spacing the review sessions over several days also helps retention more than cramming them into one sitting. There's also a specific problem I ran into that illustrates a broader issue. When working through the cardiovascular section, I hit a question about beta-blocker selection in patients with asthma. The answer key pointed to selective beta-1 blockers like metoprolol, but the explanation didn't address the dose-dependent loss of selectivity that happens at higher doses. I spent twenty minutes trying to reconcile the simplified answer with clinical reality. The workaround was straightforward: after each answer review, I flagged any question where the explanation felt incomplete and did a quick lookup in the primary text. That added maybe ten percent more time to my study session but prevented me from building false certainty around nuanced topics.
Get the Full Details
What It Gets Wrong or Does Poorly
The biggest limitation is the depth of the answer explanations. Some are useful. Many are not. They assume a baseline of knowledge that students who need the review in the first place often don't have yet. You'll encounter questions where the explanation simply states the correct drug class without walking through why the other options are wrong. That's a missed teaching opportunity that happens repeatedly throughout the book. The question quality is inconsistent. A few feel like they were written by someone who actually teaches pharmacology. Many feel like they were assembled by committee with little editing oversight. I've seen questions where the stem contains subtle clues that make the answer obvious regardless of pharmacological knowledge, which defeats the purpose of the exercise. There are also occasional factual errors or outdated dosing information. Nothing catastrophic, but enough to make blind trust in the material risky. The book also doesn't cover emerging drug classes or recent guideline changes. Depending on when your edition was printed, some of the therapeutic recommendations may be stale. This is a limitation of any print review book, but it's worth acknowledging before you invest serious study time in it.
Who Should Use It and Who Should Skip It
If you're a pharmacy student in your P1 year facing a pharmacology comprehensive exam, this book is a reasonable supplement. It will sharpen your recall and expose you to question formats you might not otherwise see. If you're a medical student using it alongside a course that already provides solid Q-banks like UWorld or Rx, it's redundant. You'll get more pedagogical value from the commercial question banks. If you're studying for the NAPLEX specifically, this won't prepare you adequately. The scope is too narrow and the clinical integration is too light. A dedicated NAPLEX review resource would serve you better at that stage.
Where to Find It
Older editions show up on Amazon, eBay, and ThriftBooks frequently. The newer printings tend to sell through the pharmacy school bookstores or through platforms like Vellum or Chegg. The digital version, if available through the publisher's portal, sometimes includes additional question banks that aren't in the print edition. I'd check with your program's curriculum coordinator before buying. Some courses already have a license to a digital copy that students can access through the library. The ISBN for the latest printing varies by revision, so verify the edition against your syllabus or professor's recommendation before purchasing. Getting an edition that's a few years old can still work fine for question practice, but the review content may lag behind current therapeutic standards if you're using it for clinical reference rather than pure test prep.
