Was recommended to read this before starting medical school. Obviously it's no replacement for shadowing/personally engaging with a variety of specialties, but I think it was particularly helpful to help me rule out certain specialties that I found boring to even read a short chapter about and learn more about less-common specialties I hadn't heard about. While I think the book gave a great general overview of the various specialties, I have some criticisms: 1) it's a bit out-of-date, and given how quickly supply and demand of various specialties change, some of the facts about salary and need were completely incorrect. And 2) It deals with the average applicant who is going to go into private practice, which fair enough, but reading it as an MD/PHD who wants to go into academic research meant that a lot of the information about lifestyle, salary, and day-to-day were probably not correct. 3). Nonetheless, I found the book to be a helpful primer to starting medical school, and it at least got me really excited to explore these specialties more.