If you need the facts about World War II, and you need them quick, The Historical Encyclopedia of World War II is a great source to get your info from! Although, the pieces in this book are fairly short, the point is made, and the facts are given, making this a great choice for students to use in those pesky research papers! I would definatly recommend this book to the avid fact-finder. However, if you're a history scholar of some kind, or if your planning to read for the pleasure factor, this book is probably not the greatest choice. Like I said earlier, this is the book to have for finding out the facts about WWII. I think it's also a great choice for history teachers to have in the class room for their students to have access to.

This book has some nice anecdotal information on the abacus. The one that comes with it is actually fairly nice. It is a Chinese 2/5 with 9 columns. This is not really enough for multiplication and division problems. Still it isn't a bad one. The algorithms for using it in the book are wrong. For instance you properly add and subtract going from left to right. You should actually do it this way on paper. Try it, it's easier than right to left. Yes they work but are not how to use it properly. If you want to really learn how to us it get Takashi Kojima's book, "Japanese Abacus: Its Use and Theory". This book will really teach you how and includes the standard tests for third and first degree certification. Understand that most modern use of the abacus is based on the 1/4 Japanese Soroban. You will never use both 5 count beads on the top, just one. And on the bottom you will use 4 of the 5 beads. You might get confused learning proper use with a Chinese Suan Pan(abacus). Still they are nice and some have larger beads easier to work than those on a Japanese Soroban. I use an abacus for teaching my first grade twins math. They are great for kids learning how to carry etc. When I was in highschool calculators were new and expensive. I used a Soroban with my slide rule. with some practice you can actually do some remarkable things with one even in the day of cheap calculators. For an alternative place for getting an abacus check out Tomoe Soroban on the internet.

This book is an excellent introduction into how to use the abacus. I think some of other reviewers here missed the point of this particular text -- it wasn't meant to be the end-all official reference of how to use an abacus. It serves it's purpose well: If you've always been curious about the little device that can be as fast as a calculator (in some people's hands), this is a good, short, book to give you an overview of the basic usage of it. If you want to become an abacus expert, I'm sure you could find thicker more expensive books that would suit you better.
In addition to lessons on how to do basic math, the monotony of the exercise chapters are broken up by a sprinkling of history, story, and lore behind the development and use of the abacus.
Overall, this is a good, brief, book which can answer the question, "How does that thing work?" Best of all, it's short enough that you could read it in an hour or two.

As a side note, the abacus it comes bundled with is also good for this introductory purpose. It's small, and unless you have tiny fingers, you'll probably bump beads unintenionally -- but for the price, it's good enough to satisfy your curiosity.

I spent years mildly curious about the abacus--particularly, any time I saw film of schoolkids or shopkeepers in Asia producing inerrant sums and differences with their fingers all a blur. Then, I saw this book, bundled with a little wooden abacus, and decided I'd give this ancient calculator a try.

I found the book an delight, with its friendly discussions of the history of the abacus, its variant forms from land to land (Chinese vs. Japanese, etc.), and, even its jolly little excursion into binary arithmetic on the abacus. Yes, I suppose it is a short book, and it doesn't spend a lot of pages on mathematical drill, but how many pages do you need? It's not like there's a complicated operating system or scripting language for this venerable tool...just the curious yet undeniable pleasure of sliding beads along sticks, just as people have been doing for centuries...

I should also mention that the abacus makes a great conversation piece, sitting out on the top of your Pentium tower at work. "My new palmtop," I tell everyone who asks.