I love Marino's book but if you want a bible for CCM, this is what it is :
Critical Care Medicine: Perioperative Management by Murray
Alright, after a few months. I have read decent amounts of Marino, a little of Marini, I purchased Murray and Textbook of critical care as well has have online access to Jesse Hall's Principles of Critical Care. So I'll give my opinion on these.
Overview Books
Marino's "The ICU Book". Very well done, concise and gets to the important point and I enjoy the fact that he provides references for pretty much everything he writes and I do like that for the most part he delineates his opinions from the text. The example I think best highlights this is the chapter on Swan's. He goes through the whole bit and then admits that there is data which shows no improvement in survival with their use, but offers his opinion that this is a test and should by itself not impact mortality in anyway. (Personally, if a test doesn't have any impact on the outcome despite using it to guide your clinical course, I'm not sure of the true utility of the test in question, but that's just me. And I'm no authority to really question Marino..) There is a lot of math and physiology references in here which at times makes for a clunky read, but ultimately, most of this is needed information to make his points.
Marini's Critical Care Medicine: The Essentials. Akin to Marino's, another well done book. Lots of relevant information which is cut down to the more clinically relevant to the ICU. I prefer Marino a bit, but that's just a personal preference. Had I started reading Marini's first, I'd probably prefer it more.
Critical Care Handbook of the Massachusetts General Hospital; Think Washington Manual for Critical care. It's a small pocket book sized and is outline formated for most of the book. It's extremely high yield, but lacks the explanations or physiology behind most of what it discusses. Personally would not be the book I'd recommend to a student to read through first, I'd use it solely as a review book.
Textbooks
Textbook of critical care: This is a textbook (obviously) so it's large, clunky and not practice to carry around. It is chock full of information and done so in nice bite-size chapter bits. It reads, IMHO, much like Harrison's, it has more attention to the bio-chemical details than many other books but is presented in a way which helps integrate the material. Out of the 3 textbooks I've perused, my personal favorite.
Critical Care Medicine: Perioperative Management. Again, another textbook, I found a copy on Amazon for $25, so I couldn't pass it up based on the above recommendation. Coming from a medicine-centric perspective, it leaves out many details and really didn't seem to offer much in the way of actual management of the conditions which it described. I had high hopes at least for the aspect of fluid management and sedation aspects of owning a book by Anesthesiologists, but the information is so chopped up and inter-dispersed in the other chapters that it isn't worth my time to really read. My personal least favorite text book of critical care.
Jesse Hall's Principles of Critical Care; Yet another textbook, and like Textbook of Critical care, much more medicine-centric. I'd call the differences between this book and Textbook of CC as being very similar to the differences between Harrison's and Cecil's. Principles of CC is a little more concise and has a less physiology to it. It starts out each chapter with a Key Points section which sums up the chapter you're about to read. It's easy to read for the most part and my second favorite of the textbooks.
