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The book loses its touch (and its uniqueness) when Mr. Weschler wanders into a generic discussion of the history of money. Overall, the author's treatment does just what it should - get out of the way and let Boggs paint a marvelous story.


The book suffers from being an enlargement of a fascinating article on the same subject. The borders between the original material and that added to make it a book-length piece are sometimes glaring. The book would have been more successful if the text were limited to the original article, and the collection of images were expanded.

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Unfortunately, the authors were not up to task. The authors are amateurs who share a great love for the subject. Unfortunately, there is large chasm between an enthusiast and a professional author. Sadly,the writing and analysis was weak. While reading the book, I wanted them to succeed but in the end, this was a book written by enthusiasts. This book only proves that gifted amateurs are a rare bird.



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it well organized and thorough enough for most topics. The travel medicine sections were excellent as were the sections on
bacterial infections. The chapters on viral infection could
have been a bit more thorough but were for the most part adequate. The sections on parasitic diseases were very well
written and appropriate for board review. Overall, I recommend
this text for ID fellows and ID practicing physicians but not for physicians in other fields.




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To write of how this was done is a feat which cannot be acheived in a single volume (Gibbon took 6 volumes and 71 chapters).
So dont expect Gibbon. However, Lawrence James has achieved the best and most impartial history of the Empire that I have read. It is easy to read, impartial, pithy and full of irony which may sadly be missed by non native English speakers.
There are two books here - a documented history of the Empire and then between the lines, a second book about science, human nature and cause and effect that is a lesson to every living human. Which is why this book is an important read for everyone.

Indeed, in my opinion, prior editions (1950, 1962, 1981) of this same text are superior, particularly the second edition. Although these too have their share of integral calculus and complex algebra, the quantity is more appropriate for a discipline that is mostly science and engineering but with aspects of art to it as well.
Bear in mind that aside from a few specialized areas -- like ultrasonics and its use in medical imaging and non-destructive testing, or the use of digital processing in sound generation and vibration analysis -- little new has come about in the field of acoustics since World War II. Thus unlike with most fields of science, there is no necessity to have the most modern texts to gather a wholly modern understanding of the field (with a few minor exceptions).
Indeed, I recently examined almost every text relating to acoustics contained in the circumferential stacks of the Barker Engineering Library under the Great Dome of M.I.T. (and sadly, there aren't as many texts as one might hope). I was surprised both at the age of most volumes in the collection -- and the fact that most had not been checked out of the library in years.
Indeed, from the "Date Due" slips in the back, you could see the field was very popular in the 1960's and 1970's, but popularity seemed to wane in the early 1980's -- approximately contemporaneously, curiously, with the introduction of the digital CD format of audio recording.
By the mid-1990's, at M.I.T., at least, interest in acoustics among faculty and students seem to have declined precipitiously, if the popularity of library texts and the quantity of student theses published in the field is any indication.
Of all the general texts on acoustics that I examined -- to me, one clearly stood out above the others. It was published in 1957 by Harry F. Olsen, Ph.D., the lead acoustical scientist at the RCA Research Laboratories in Princeton, New Jersey. It is entitled, "Acoustical Engineering", although the text contains all the fundamental science as well. This volume was reprinted in 1991 and is currently available.
Olsen's work is surely a magnum opus, comprising 736 pages and 567 illustrations. It has its fair share of math, but the concepts are often additionally explained through well-crafted line drawings, showing, for example, wave forms drawn in progressive fashion in serial graphs, some of which are designed so that one can even mentally rotate the graphics to gather a three-dimensional perspective. Furthermore, the graphs are often supplemented by art showing equivalent mechanical and electrical analogs, to further assist in understanding.
Best of all, Olsen explains virtually everything acoustical you would ever want to know, from theories of acoustical wave propagation, to an enormous variety of loudspeaker designs, to the mathematical reasoning behind Johann Sebastian Bach's tempered tuning of musical instruments, an artistic practice that is almost universal today.
Thus if it is a text for a problem-oriented course in acoustics that one seeks -- the fourth edition of the "Fundamentals of Acoustics" is a fine text. However, if one wishes to have a ready reference that is extraordinarily comprehensive, or a pedagogical work that doesn't focus on mathematical derivations, better choices can surely be made.