Commentaries are primarily intended for close reading; but close reading a work in translation (especially in a very literary translation like Fitzgerald's, which takes a few liberties: but the principle is true for *all* translations) is a dangerous game. This book is probably best for giving you some idea of how you *could* apply close reading to the Odyssey if you knew Greek, or for helping a student with weak Greek skills to narrow something down before looking in the original, maybe; the commentaries on the Greek text are more likely to keep you on the straight and narrow (because of their nature; nothing to blame Prof. Hexter for).

This work describes a system for commodity speculation called Interval
Trading. The premise and system are simple. Because the value of a
commodity will never go to zero, any downward trend will
eventually bottom out and reverse. To take advantage of this behavior
the authors suggest buying futures contracts at fixed intervals as the
price drops, and then reselling them at fixed intervals as the price
recovers.

This system requires the knowledge or faith that prices eventually
will recover, and tremendous capital to cover accumulated losses while
waiting for a price recovery that may take months, years, or decades to
materialize. This advice violates several of the tenets of successful
trading in that it requires trading against the trend, holding losing
positions forever, and only taking small, fixed profits. Small
traders following this advice should expect to go broke.

The authors' credibility is fatally damaged when then spend several
pages arguing that if you are long a contract, and then sell and
immediately re-buy the contract, then this is somehow different
from simply holding the original contract. Where I'm from,

(- X) + X = 0.

Furthermore, the authors never suggest that they or their clients have made
any money from this extremely risky scheme.

This is a highly risky speculation system, and its
exposition here is mathematically unsound. Intelligent speculators
will avoid this book.

Only the most basic, introductory concepts are covered. As the textbook begins to probe a concept more deeply and the material becomes challenging, you'll find that there is no companion material on the CD ROM.

Where this becomes particularly insulting is in the way this remedial material is presented. It's literally childlike, on the level of a 10-year-old boy. These are actual descriptions from the box: "Basketball-playing robot and friendly Mars Rover take you through an explanation of derivatives-"; With the help of a colorful hot-air balloon, the greedy landlord..."; "A greedy boss and a skateboarding robot help you master the concept of area." Nothing like this appears in the product description on Amazon and nothing in the Stewart textbook leads you to believe you're purchasing a $... kid's cartoon. If you're taking college calculus you're way past this level of intellect and you don't deserve to be ripped off and insulted!

I challenge the publisher to refute my statements or at least use the above product descriptions, from the box, as the product description here on Amazon. Amazon, you're a good company and you shouldn't associate with this product.

A dictionary is no good if it doesn't have the words you want to look up!