Bonzo Beaver is my 8 year old daughter's all-time favorite book. She started reading it at our local library when she was about 3 years old. Now it is discarded and I am trying to find out how to purchse a new or used one.

It is a great book! 5 1/2 stars all the way!

Sincerely, Mary Ann Nalbone

The Internal Revenue Service has made significant changes to regulations affecting nonprofits, shifting responsibility for compliance from the organization itself to the directors, staffs, and major donors as individuals. Most nonprofit board members and executives are only dimly aware of these changes, and fewer still are prepared with the documentation necessary to address issues of conflict of interest, private inurement, and disqualified persons.

One sentence from the book's introduction sums up the need for action: "The most important aspect of this legislation is that it empowers the IRS to impose punishment on individuals who violate the tax code by levying significant excise taxes initially and then more than quadrupling the penalty amount if remedy is not made to the [nonprofit] organization."

The solution, and the purpose of the book, is also summed up in one sentence in the introduction: "The key to protecting these organizations' officers and other interested parties from excise taxes is proper documentation."

The book is 3-ring bound and well-tabbed for easy reference and for copying of template forms and sheets that are included. In addition, the book ships with a companion PC diskette with forms in Microsoft Word 6.0/Word 95 format that should be usable by most current word processing programs.

This book is a valuable resource for nonprofit executives, consultants, attorneys, and others providing organizational development and counseling to nonprofits and charities.

The book does include examples and references to the health care field, but its content is equally applicable to all nonprofits.

The book's Table of Contents is as follows:

1. Overview of the Intermediate Sanctions Law 2. Establishing an Intermediate Sanctions Review Process 3. Disqualified Persons Determination 4. Diagnostic Review for Disqualified Persons 5. Diagnostic Review for Organization Manager Liability 6. Examining Revenue-Sharing Transactions 7. Rebuttable Presumption of Reasonableness

Appendices

-- Intermediate Sanctions Law -- Excerpt from House Ways and Means Committee Report on Taxpayer Bill of Rights 2 -- Intermediate Sanctions Proposed Regulations -- IRS Model Conflicts of Interest Policy

Since Boyer writes from the perspective of a math professor in the thirties and forties, some of his style is dated. Nevertheless, his content is not and remains just as accurate as it was when first written. There are few mathematical tools that are more useful than the calculus and yet it is based on several abstractions that are never achieved. However, we act as if it they are, manipulating limits as if they were whole numbers and manipulating infinities as if they are real objects.
The original ideas that began the development of the calculus are very old, the first known exposition of the problems of limits is the well known paradox proposed by Zeno, which dates back to ancient Greece. Zeno's arguments involving the Tortoise and Achilles still serve as intellectual fodder for many a philosophical debate. Therefore, the second chapter deals with the mathematics of antiquity that began the long intellectual journey towards the dual creation of calculus by Newton and Liebniz.

While there were some advancements in the medieval years, they were relatively unsubstantial and therefore Boyer spends only a brief time with them. Unfortunately, he concentrates on the activity in Europe, ignoring some of the work in other parts of the world. The fourth chapter deals with the century before Newton, where the last of the foundation ideas were set down and Newton's giants did their work and puffed out their shoulders.
The fifth chapter is devoted largely to the parallel work of Newton and Liebniz, where they independently invented what we now call differential and integral calculus. While the utility of the new mathematics could not be denied, there were many people who found great fault in it. It is easy for us to think of these critics as short sighted, but in fact many of their arguments were valid. Despite all the genius of Newton and Liebniz, there were still many gaps in the calculus that had to be corrected, which is the subject of the remaining chapters.
Written at a level so that mathematicians and laypeople alike can understand the ideas and how they expanded over the centuries, this is a book that is still of use in histories of mathematics and the centuries long development of ideas.

This book clearly shows how the underlying concept of the caculus had been developed from geometric intuiton to formal logical elaboration. It feels good to know that even Newton himself was having trouble defining the infinitesimals. Now I can understand why modern calculus books are filled with so many strict definitions of continuity and limits. Mathematicians had to establish rigorous formulation of the calculus to free themselves from the vague definition of physical realities which modern physicist cannot understand even now.

The way I look at this book is that it is giving me the historical development of Calculus in a compact book. It starts with ancient grreks goes to middel ages, developes with Lebnitz and Newton and finale with modern theory. I am not interested in the Philosophy of History or not in position to allocate prizes to Scientist of the past. From that point of view I believe this book gives you the chronology with a lot of information about some obscure mathematicians who contributed to the field. I wish there was a littel more mathematics in it such as fluxions etc more descriptive examples but do you know any other book.