Hughes has picked out an interesting subject to write a book about--namely the rise of large scale technological projects in the post WWII world. Unfortuantely, I don't think he's enough of a writer to bring it off.

The best popular science/history hybrids bring you a sense of the excitement of the technological advance, a new knowledge of the problems faced and solutions found, and an insight into the characters and personalities behind the science. Hughes doesn't really do any of this. The book is extremely dry and reads like a laundry list of facts rather than a compelling narrative. None of the characters ever come alive. And for the most part, I didn't feel he did a very good job presenting the technological challenges faced. I think he perhaps tried to do too much with the book, telling four stories instead of one or two in the depth required to really draw the reader in.

I really wanted to like this book, especially as a former worker in operations research/systems analysis. But unfortunately, Hughes doesn't deliver on the promise that the subject has.

The chapters on SAGE, the Atlas missile program, and ARPANET were outstanding expositions of project management. What hit home for me was the depiction of the ultimate success of the visionary scientist/engineers associated with these programs, especially Licklider.

It's interesting to note there was quite a bit of fallout rather recently regarding problems with the Boston CA/T project; it seems there will be lessons to take away from that in the future and might make for a good reason for Hughes to revisit this work in a second edition.

Seamus Hughes played a useful role in Irish trades unions, the 1916 Rising, the first Irish government and particularly as the first Irish broadcaster. This book has tried to set him up as a model for Catholic activism but this seems a mistake to me; it slants the story somewhat. More interesting is the lack of heroic qualities, the plain normality of the man and perhaps it is the lack of heroes that most needs remarking of the new Irish state. [warning: his grandson writing] This book is well written and offers some insights into the period.

That "Gods of Death" [is] a sensationalist puff-piece written like a very slow spy novel.
There is a lot of speculation over the validity of snuff films and while there's certainly a possibility that they do exist Mr. Svoray doesn't present a very compelling argument. The one thing he NEVER acheives is to convince us of a worldwide underground for this stuff. More to the point, he actually acheives the opposite with his bumbling investigation, which is convince the reader that snuff films are not so much an industry unto themselves but rather an isolated occurance.
Throughout his investigation he askes the reader to accept a lot without giving us any real incentive. The "I know it doesn't look like much but you'll just have to trust me" method is the main device that is employed throughout this book.
While you certainly won't find any meaty informative value in this book one might be so inclined as to read it just for morbid curiousity, especially in the light of recent movies like "8mm", and I can tell you in all seriousness that it falls flat in that avenue as well. "Gods of Death" [is] more or less like a pulp spy novel. The only problem is that it is too dreadfully paced and full of macho bravado to even entice the most desperate spy novel geek. And as it pertains to its main character, Mr. Svoray, he tries to put himself over but instead comes across like an irredeemable [idiot].
While I'm certain that some reviewers are of the skeptic camp I'm also sure that there were a great many more that were like myself who went into it with a "show me" attitude. I was willing to accept a possible theory as long as there was sufficient evidence to back it up. Needless to say, there wasn't. As it seems "Gods of Death" makes its entire case on hearsay.
If you are waiting for an intelligent and believable look into the world of snuff pornography I suspect you'll have to wait a while longer. If it's just perverse entertainment you're into then rent "8mm". It's more enjoyable and ultimately more realistic than Yaron Svoray would have you believe.

Israeli Yaron Svoray, the man who exposed Nazis in "In Hitler's Shadow," this time searches for "snuff" films, filmed records of actual murders. Though there is an aspect of journalism here, the book reads more like a spy novel, albeit not an especially well-written one. Because of the thriller-esque nature of the book, saying whether Svoray actually finds a snuff film would, in a sense, give away the ending, and I will not indicate whether he is ultimately successful.

What I will say, however, is that the existence of actual snuff films has been a topic of much speculation. Many view such films as "urban myths," stories that many believe are true but are not. Others, particularly anti-pornography feminists such as Catharine MacKinnon (who is mentioned in the book), seem to have an abiding faith that such films really do exist. The existence of actual snuff films would do much to support the sex-violence link of pornography and to support the arguments of many feminists. But the issue is not of concern merely to feminists; certainly any rational person should be disgusted if snuff films do exist.

"Gods of Death" is Svoray's search for such a film, and it is a search that nearly costs his life and finances. Svoray recounts accurately (one presumes) the many dead ends and false leads he encountered, and therein lies part of the problem with the book. From the very first word of the book, there is one overriding question: Did he find an actual snuff film? The answer can be summarized in a single word (either yes or no), but the answer is a long way off. The book, therefore, reads like a frustrating tease. No doubt Svoray felt that way himself throughout the process, but it bears mention to note that part of the art of journalism is sifting out the extraneous details. The story, therefore, becomes less about the existence of such films and more about an obsessive search for them.

One thing that the book does make clear is that if such films exist, they are indeed very hard to find. To this extent, Svoray at least implicitly discounts much of the urban myth in that the extraordinary lengths to which he went indicate that the average person would not be able to find an actual snuff film.

Admittedly reads more like a potboiler thriller at times, and I strongly suspect it was written with the big screen in mind - understandable, since much of the book is comprised of the author's financial concerns & what his obsession with finding out the truth behind snuff films drives him to do and spend, both monetarily and emotionally.

When his investigation came to end, the author had a problem (another reviewer already gives away the ending, so I don't think I'm divulging any secrets): he hadn't managed to come up with the goods - he'd finally gotten his hands on a tape, but it was stolen from him while he was detained in a Serbian police station. So what do you do? His answer is to make a book out of the subjective experience of hunting down the truth - what he goes through, how it affects his family life, his psychological state, the potentially life-threatening situations he encounters, the characters he meets & how he gets on with them. This makes some sense, because the reader wants to understand the mental and moral state of people who could actually make, enjoy, or be in any way involved with these films, as well as what effects such images have on 'normal' people - as Svoray says, once you've seen them, there's no going back. Unfortunately Svoray doesn't have the psychological insight to make much of this (a much better example of real insight into monstrosity and evil is Christopher Browning's "Ordinary Men," which looks at a single battallion in Poland as a case study to understand how so many people could have committed the Holocaust) - great credit to him for his investigative skills, but his constant efforts at casting himself as moral judge disallow him from genuine understanding, and his portraits come straight from stock characters from standard thrillers. This problem potentially undermines the book's veracity, but one can also argue that he merely understands these people on the same terms borrowed from Hollywood, or that his co-writer (a screenwriter) compressed his character portraits to make for a fast read.

The book is a very quick read and compelling at times, and the reader must admire the author's bravado. So, in the end, does his claim to have seen real snuff films stand up? What proof does he offer? Here's something: he claims to have set up a viewing for the actor Robert De Niro and a friend of De Niro's; he recounts a conversation between the two men in which they say they believed the film was real; and De Niro's press agent has confirmed the viewing. So, while Svoray couldn't come up with any hard evidence, the De Niro story is pretty convincing that such films do in fact exist, and that there is indeed pure evil (in Svoray's terms) in the world.

...P>I don't have a Ph.D. from Harvard either, but I should be getting one next year.

I have had to teach an introductory calculus course at Harvard that follows the "Harvard Calculus" treatment that originated with this book (though the course did not use this book). It was awful. It is no easier to teach this course than it is to learn from it. Students need to learn calculus first *before* applying it to the various fields they will study.

My College Calculus professor uses this book as a suppliment to provide examples for the class use. Everyone hates the problems as they are vague and lack any explanation on how to solve the problem or even where to begin. It appears to me that someone wrote a book simply to create problems that cannot be solved by the book's explanations. Calculus requires a working understanding of the ideas and concepts of the base math before an sort of obscure application should be used. I would not recommend this book to anyone, unless they already have a good understanding of calculus and wish to delve further into the application of the math to the real world. In that case, buy the book. For the other 95% that are just wanting to learn calculus; go buy a different book that teaches you something first.

In my experience with this text, students either love it or hate it. They hate it because it does not offer a brief overview of the topics, like many more popular calculus text books. Instead "Calculus: Single Variable" requires that a student throughly read many examples as it explains rules and laws along the way. Those who love the text do so because the examples offer a firmer understanding of the concepts at hand, instead of just covering enough material to answer the questions at the end of each section. Although this is a very good text book, it definitely requires patience on behalf of the reader, and may not be the book for students who just want to slide by.

The book is a disaster. I had to suffer with it for 2 semesters. None of the other students in my Calc I and Calc II courses got anything from it either, as far as I can tell. I had to scramble and seek information from other calc books in order to understand what differentiation and integration was all about. The text in no way prepares one for the exercises. There's no connection between the text and the exercises. In the exercises there appear some inane, open-ended questions that seem to be trying to make some unfathomable point. This is not a book anyone can learn from. I would strongly advise any student who must use this book as their course textbook to CHANGE COLLEGES. There are many great calculus books out there, on all levels. For those who prefer a 'calculus reform' approach, I would recommend Calculus Lite, by Frank Morgan. For the more traditional approach, I got a lot out of Anton's classic.

Teaching with this text - which I've been doing for the past two semesters - is an uphill battle, to say the least. It's a text designed for non-majors; I teach business and social science students. Instructors of these sorts of students need to convince their pupils that they DO need to know how to reason mathematically, and that math IS relevant to their life plans - they can't just rely on their calculators to do all their work for them. When the textbook seems to disagree, our job is all the more difficult.

The authors of _Calculus_ don't seem to have made up their minds regarding whether or not it is necessary to introduce the notion of mathematical justification in this book. On the one hand, the examples feature sound arguments for why a curve looks the way it does, or why a critical point is a maximum or minimum - but on the other hand, alongside Newton's Method and the Bisection Method for estimating roots, is a "Using the Zoom Function on Your Calculator" primer on how to estimate the zeroes of functions. Offhand remarks about "and you can use your graphing calculator for this and that" serve to seriously undermine any attempt to explain to first-year students the concept of mathematical argument - which is unfamiliar to many.

The organization of the chapters is also somewhat questionable. Differentiation is broken up into two sections: one dealing with the concept of a derivative (complete with pictures), and the other pertaining to computing them. While the idea of introducing differentiation through a concrete example - measuring instantaneous velocity given a displacement function - is a good one, by the time students actually get to work with derivatives, they're no longer focused on what they actually represent. Curve sketching is introduced vaguely at the end of the second chapter - before the shortcuts to differentiation are mentioned - and then revisited only in chapter 4.

The section on integration is even worse: again, it's introduced in a concrete manner - this time, by asking how displacement can be computed from a velocity function. But for some bizarre reason, the authors don't take this opportunity to explain that the area under a velocity curve - the integral - is that same displacement function whose derivative was the velocity. It's a perfect opportunity to do so, as it's an interesting and surprising (to the beginner) result, and one that's accessible at this point in the course. But instead, the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus is relegated to a later section, long after the "integral as an area" idea has been abandoned and students are just working with integrals as antiderivatives. (Even more curiously, there's a section entitled "The Second Fundamental Theorem of Calculus", but none called "The First Fundamental Theorem of Calculus".)

I'd highly recommend James Stewart's _Calculus_ instead of this text for a first-year calc course: the material is far better explained, and there's even a section on the inadequacies of graphing calculators (which are expensive, and which most first year students don't have the mathematical background to use properly).

When I took Multivariable Calculus, we used "Multivariable Calculus" by James Steward in class. I personal like Steward's book very much because it made me understand without the help of my professor. With a supplement of this book, I found I understand Multivariable Calculus in a more comprehensive way. All in all, I like this book a lot.

Besides the picture on the front, this book is horrible! I've learned more by personal derivation and experimenting than through this book. The explanations are overly bloated, and include so many approximations and tables that the theory behind this book's ramblings is lost completely. Instead of focusing on theoretical multivariable calculus while introducing, as a short diversion an approximating method, this book builds around a foundation of approximations, which clouds the actual mathematics in the process.

In my opinion, unless theory is ingrained in students' heads from the start, they will never even attempt to understand it. After all, the book gives the theory second priority, so why should students pay any attention to it?

Moreover, in the introduction, the book promises to have problem sets that a student "cannot just look for a similar example to solve... you will have to think." However, after working with this book's homework problems, I've found them to be the exact opposite of this! There are plenty of similar examples for any given problem, and as a result the teacher's role becomes trivial, while at the same time students don't really understand anything they're doing. Not only this, but the problems are overly MUNDANE, and there is too much practice for a single concept. If a student has taken calculus, he can do derivatives, so he should not need 31 exercises to learn how to do partial derivatives.

Capping all this off, there are no truly challenging problems at all in this book. All of them focus on mechanical methods rather than clever application of known theory. The biggest challenge in this book, in fact, is keeping your hand intact as you take 50 partial derivatives, and then hit a problem that says "repeat for the second partial derivatives."

Meanwhile, your fine motor skills deteriorate quickly as you overwork them drawing or re-drawing a graph or table every other problem.

Bravo, Debbie Hughes, you can use Mathematica's graphing capabilities to their fullest. We're all proud of you. Now can you keep them out of your textbook? No one wants to see a billion tables staring them in the face, and then have to copy and change a billion more for homework. That's not a way to learn. This whole textbook is just a way to pretend you're learning.

Waiting to really learn anything from this book is like waiting for Richard Simmons to get married. Trust me, it's not gonna happen, folks.

kubkhan

"This innovative book is the product of an NSF funded calculus consortium based at Harvard University and was developed as part of the calculus reform movement" Beware of Harvard, i.e. reform Calculus. Instead of teaching people about maxima and minima, you show them how to use a calculator to guess. What a load of junk. Nobody learns what anything means, just how to apply formulas, etc. It is a shame what books and authors like these are doing to college mathematics. This book is particularly bad, a whole bunch of fluff, not a damn ounce of substance.

I have to disagree with my fellow Californians and unfortunately agree with someone from New York. This is an excellent foundation overview without the clutter of Anton's and Stewart's books. I found it to be a conveniently carried paperback and an enjoyable read.

Skipped around leaving some odd problems out of book. Only explained a few problems in total detail. This is by far the worst solutions manual on the market. Bring it back for a refund before its to late.

This is, without a doubt, the most incredibly worthless book I have come across in my college experience. I am getting an A in Calculus in spite of, and NOT because of this book. The so-called "Harvard Method" leaves the student with the concepts of calculus, but with none of the tools to actually perform the operations. If you get stuck with this as a required text, I strongly recommend you also purchase a traditional calculus text to actually learn from.

I used this book about three years ago for all my three calculus classes, and most of my classmates liked it. We found this book to be very challenging because it made us think all semester long. We also liked it because our professor explained every single example of the book; most of all, they were very explained by our professor. Now I am looking forward to see the new edition of the book.

I wish I would have read the previous review before buying it. All I needed was some general information (structure etc.) on how iostreams work and this book did little for me. I do not recommend it to anyone

Actually, zero stars

I had high expectations for this book but was utterly disappointed. This book has not had even elementary copy editing performed -- I found *hundreds* of typographical and technical errors -- and the writing style had short, simple sentences that was maddening to read when compared to the wonderful writing of (say) Stroustrup. The authors have chosen a graphical model to represent class hierarchies that I have not seen before and found very hard to visualize, and their "introduction" to inheritance and class construction was disorganized and confusing (a new C++ user would be lost). Their description of manipulators was cursory and disappointing, and their real examples later in the book didn't seem to use any extended ones.

Some of their code examples have merit -- notably communications ports -- but the technical material surrounding the code was bug-ridden (all the the RS-232 diagrams had mistakes, for instance).

The Stroustrup *chapter* on iostreams was much better than this whole book, so I cannot recommend this book to anybody. I'll be sending mine to the authors with my markups in the hope they fix the bugs, but even without the bugs it was a terrible book.

This book is so pathetically minimal that I award it...1/10 of a star. (It may be useful in starting a fire in your fireplace...maybe). DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY ON THIS SOLUTION MANUAL! It only includes about every other odd solution, and most of the time, it shows just the (often incorrect) answer. The worst part is, that same answer is usually in the back of the textbook! It is definitely not worth even $5.00, so save your money!