I bought this book on Amazon to brush up on my knowledge of neuromodulators, their mechanisms of action, and their functional role in cortical circuits. This book looked to fit the bill, and the table of contents seemed right on target. Unfortunately, the reality is that this book was a terrible book. First, the book is poorly written. The author has simply gone through medline and searched for ever article written in the past 10 years with "acetylcholine" or "serotonin" as a keyword. Then he has reduced the abstract into one sentence, and strung that sentence in with many others with very little if any congruency of message. Plus, because the actual papers were obvioulsy not read, the meaning imparted in the book is OFTEN inaccurate. Just pick a citation, download the actual document, and compare to the text of this book and you will see that this book not only is light on the details, but is often WRONG about the details. Plus, the haphazard writing style makes it a very slow and difficult read. Another problem is that older papers are simply ignored, even if they are still today the best demonstration of something. There are some "classic" yet still relevant papers that should have been cited but were not. As you can tell, I'm quite disappointed with this book. I would suggest one of the other books on the subject (perhaps one by Trevor Stone), but I spent all the cash I have on this book and will have to wait for next year to try again.