Review of Fundamentals of Actuarial Mathematics (Hardcover)

The problem with Life Insurance mathematics is that there are very few really good books on the topic. This book does little to alleviate this situation. Inspite of its title, "Fundamentals of Actuarial Mathematics" is essential a text book on Life Insurance mathematics. Of its 372 pages, 243 are devoted to Life Insurance mathematics (the remaining pages focussing on risk theory, in particular compound distributions, Markov chains, Poisson processes and ruin models, all of which are usually considered in the context of property and casualty or general insurance).

The explanations in the book are easy to understand and a reasonable number of worked examples and exercises are provided (with answers to the exercises given at the end of the book). However, at the same time, the explanations lack depth and the text book stops short of covering many of the more advanced topics in Actuarial Mathematics (such as increasing insurance policies and bonuses).

This is an adequate book for beginners and would be appropriate as a first text in Actuarial Mathematics. However, more advanced students are likely to find this book to be lacking.



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Review of Risk Management and Insurance (Hardcover)

This textbook offers a detailed, panoptic view of the field of insurance and risk management. Author Etti G. Baranoff does not seem to promote a philosophical, narrative or analytical point of view on the subject. Instead, she aims to provide students with a dense introduction to the field's bedrock information. Therefore, she presents a vast number of facts related to insurance and risk management, but generally refrains from taking a position on them. This is the sort of book one is assigned as the well-chosen, required text in a course on insurance. The author expertly defines every necessary term and explores every important aspect of the decision to buy or forego insurance, including legal implications, policy variants and alternative products. We suggest that corporate risk managers may want to keep it on their bookshelves for its excellent definitions and its appendices, which offer illustrative excerpts from several different insurance policies. Even those who are not in the risk management business could benefit from some chapters, especially those recommending ways to calculate the appropriate amount of insurance.



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