This is the guide book to get if you are thinking of doing a river trip in Maine. The information in it has been thoroughly checked and is very accurate. It tells you if you need permits for campsites and even tells you the quality for those sites. It has excellent detailed descriptions of all significant rapids and even suggests the best route to take. It has every conceivable trip from a half-day to a week or more. As a professional in the field, this is a book that I rely when planning any canoe expeditions in the state.

This book is very challenging. As you go from the first page to the last you see it gets more difficult. A must for all beginners in Calculus.

T.S. Eliot labelled Sidney's Arcadia as a "monument of dullness," and about 100 pages into the book, I felt inclined to agree with his assessment. Sidney was a poet first and foremost, and even he admitted to his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, that this particular work was but "a trifle."

Yet, surprisingly, I found myself getting captivated by the plot of two princes disguised as shepherds to win the girls of their dreams (in the process, of course, they also win girls -- and guys -- of their nightmares). The somewhat stilted (even by Renaissance standards) language makes it difficult to plod through at times, but the plot is interesting and keeps your attention -- and that's ultimately what counts.

Re: this edition, it is one of the few good editions of the original "Old" Arcadia around. Sidney revised the work during his lifetime and his friend and biographer, Fulke Greville, later published a bizarre composite of the old and revised versions that for centuries stood as the definitive "Arcadia". K. Duncan-Jones provides a clean text with useful scholarly apparatus. One caveat: in my edition, pp. 297-306 were *missing*, mistakenly replaced by a double-printed pp. 307-316. This is an annoyance for someone who is reading the book as a scholar, which I believe represents the majority readership of the book, as I can't imagine casual readers picking it up for bedstand reading!
All in all, a fun work and better than the first act leads one to believe!

The first half of this text seems be be a bit simple. Many of the problems are confusing at best. The authors are not very clear on what they want. Many students in my class were frustrated by this time and time again. Still other times the questions were way to easy and never really chalanged the students. Basicly the first half does not provied a good solid base for Calculus. The second half is just flat out poorly written. It leaves the students constently scraching their heads wondering what the authors want. Questions are asked in such a way as to not make sence or not to follow the chapters very well. Chapt 7 is very much like this. Bad. The faculty agrees by having to put out an additional book of their own to help provide a better understanding of Trig.
Over all this book needs to be re-thought out. A poor choise for instructors wanting their students to get a solid base so as to takle more advaced math classes.

I like pictures of people on bikes. It makes me feel better because riding mountain bikes is fun. So when I work on functions, I feel happier.

Great book! It is especially good for understanding what different functions do, and how. This is very important for understanding calculus. Great examples, always linking functions with things in real life.

This book glorifies the unnescessary and cruel practice of genital cutting. Not suitable for children.

Jewish books are cool but when I read this one it was one of my favorites. Its a great book for kids under the ages of 10. Judy Silverman is my librarian at Temple Shalom, my sunday/hebrew school. I hope she sees her first 5 star review sometime!

Out of print? Good! This book is so filled with bits of extraneous material that it is almost impossible to follow. Despite considerable interest in the subject matter, and despite returning to the book four or five times, I could not distinguish which facts pertained to Sir Philip Sidney and which to the hundreds of people with whom he came into contact without almost graphing out the characters. It was worse than any Russian novel.

What a great book! This is biography at its best. Katherine Duncan-Jones succeeds in that most difficult of tasks - writing a biographical work that is at the same time scholarly and amusing. She paints a convincing portrait of this gifted, generous and tormented individual,who was also remarkably tolerant and warm-hearted for the times in which he lived. Sidney emerges from this book as a sophisticated and highly intelligent man who felt bitter and frustrated because of the unfair treatment he received at the hands of a capricious Queen, in whose service he nevertheless lost his very life. Altogether, I found Sidney very different from the typical Elizabethan - his dislike of hunting as a cruel, bloody sport, and his enlightened views on women are some of the traits in which we recognize a modern mind. And, nevertheless, after his absurd death he became a sort of hero or role-model for his contemporaries - many of whom hadn't recognized his worth while he lived. Duncan-Jones writes elegantly and in an entertaining style, quoting extensively from Sidney's writings as well as from those of his relatives and friends. I completely disagree with another reviewer, who criticized the "extraneous material" and the quantity of facts and persons in the book. No material is extraneous here: everything is relevant, either to Sidney's life or to the social and political context in which it must be viewed. As to the amount of characters - well, think about your own life: if someone were to write your biography, how many characters would there be? Four of five? I wouldn't trust a biography that didn't have many characters (even counting only the significant ones). After all, every person's life is complex - and full of other persons. All in all, this book is highly recommended - you'll gain a great awareness of an exceptional man.