Since he wrote these stories during the several years he spent in Brattleboro, VT, we of the North Country have a particular affinity for Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Books. The most familiar are the Mowgli tales, basis for the very good Disney movie. Mowgli is an Indian infant who is lost in the jungle after Shere Khan (the tiger) kills his family. Bagheera (the black panther) places him with a wolf family that has a newborn litter. Mowgli's new "parents" and Bagheera and Baloo (the brown bear) sponsor him for membership in the Wolf Pack and, much to Shere Khan's chagrin, he is admitted. Mowgli is raised according to Jungle Law, but all the while Shere Khan is plotting his revenge and ingratiating himself with the younger wolves. Eventually, he leads a rebellion against Akela, the pack's aging leader and attacks Mowgli, who beats him away with a burning firebrand. In these and the several other Mowgli stories--there are some prequels--Kipling strikes a nice balance between anthropomorphizing the animals and understanding Mowgli's natural superiority.

Also appearing in this collection is a story I've loved since I first saw the Classic Cartoon version--Rikki Tikki Tavi. It tells the story of an intrepid young mongoose and his life or death battle to protect an Indian villa from a couple of particularly unpleasant cobras. Rikki Tikki Tavi has always seemed to me to be one of the great heroes in all of literature.

These are great stories for young and old. For folks who worry about Kipling's potentially imperialist, racist or racialist overtones (see review), rest assured, these tales are free of such themes. They offer an excellent opportunity to introduce kids to the work of a true master storyteller.

GRADE: A

The story of Mowgli, a boy raised by wolves in the jungles of 19th century India, charmed me when I was young no less than it does today. Kipling wrote this to celebrate his love of India and it's wild animals as well as to show again some of his frequent themes of honor, loyalty, and perserverance. While his writing may seem 'dated' to some, to others the truths he includes rise above politics and 'current correctness'. Baloo the Bear, Shere Khan the Tiger, Bagheera the Panther, Kaa the Python were all childhood friends of mine, and reading these Jungle Book stories to your own children today will result in their exposure to such old fashioned concepts as sticking by your friends in adversity, helping your family, relying on yourself. Good lessons then, good lessons now. Mowgli learns the value of 'good manners' early on, learns that 'all play and no work' leads to unexpected troubles, learns that thoughtless actions can have devasting consequences. By showing Mowgli in an often dangerous 'all animal' world, we see reflections of modern human problems presented in a more subtle light. Kipling leads children down the jungle path into adventures beyond their day to day imagining and along the way, he weaves subtle points in and out of the stories, he shows the value of 'doing for yourself', of 'learning who to trust'. All of this in a tale of childhood adventure that's never been equaled. The book is over 100 years old now, and there are terms & concepts from the age of Empire that aren't 'correct' today. Parents can edit as needed as they read bedtime stories, but I've found that children learn early on that the world changes, and that some ideas that were popular long ago did not prove to be correct. Explaining this, too, is a part of parenting. Some of our current popular ideas may not stand the test of time, but I suspect that 100 years from now parents will still read the Jungle Book to their children. And the children will still be charmed, thrilled and instructed in valuable life-lessons.

The Jungle Books are usually marketed as juvenile fiction. True, this is essential reading for children, but it's even deeper when you read it as an adult.

Although "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi" and "The White Seal" are just as good as the least of the Mowgli stories, it is the various tales of the boy raised in the jungles of India that are - and justifiably - the heart of the collection.

As a baby, Mowgli is found and raised by a clan of wolves and three godfatherly mentors who each teach him about life in different ways - Baloo the Bear, who teaches him the technical laws he'll need to survive; Kaa the Python, the nearly archtypal figure who teaches him even deeper lessons; and Bagheera the Panther, who perhaps loves Mowgli most of all but understands all too well the implications of the ambiguous humanity of the boy he's come to care for.

The stories have it all, from the alternately humorous and frightening "Kaa's Hunting", where Mowgli learns an important lesson about friendship and it's responsibility, to the epic "Red Dog" that reads like something out of Homer, to "Letting in the Jungle" which, without giving anything away contains a disturbing paragraph that's both glaring and a long time in coming if you've read between the lines in the previous Mowgli stories and yet at the same time so subtle you can almost miss it's importance.

If you didn't read it as a child, read it now. If you did, read it again as an adult.

Good, but NEEDS A GOOD REVISION!!!!
Ok I don't agree with the 1 star grading by one of the reviewers here. Yet what he points out does make an awful lot of sense. The book needs a BIG revision. It has not been changed in a while and although the mechanics that it describes has not changed either, the diagrams could use a good enhanced computer touch. Like most of the reviewers here I too used this book for my honors freshman physics course at Cornell (PHYSICS 116). I don't like that fact that they pull tons of things out of a magic hat just because it works. Instead of explaining the stuff they magically bring in the chapter "Notes" like they do they could simply do it while they are explaining the material. I think that if you are in an "advanced" physics course you ought to now that stuff it should not be just optional. Thankfully I was taking a Differential Equations class, which helped understand that harmonic oscillators which are so poorly explained in this text book.
There is good and bad to say about the problems at the end of every chapter. As many here point out they are indeed challenging, but they are not clear many times. Also the "Ans. clue[s]" are not reliable since we (my professor, and my class) have found several of them to be wrong (Example: Problem 3.17). I would love to see a revised copy of this book with a solutions manual like most modern text books, since it would make it much easier to study for exams. I should add that the reason they use this book in my school as well as many others, is not so much for its reputation as a "good book", but because it's one of the only books out there that combines a decent amount of relativity with the classical Newtonian mechanics that most books concentrate on. Yet not even the relativity chapters are really complete. Again it could use some nicely drawn space-time diagrams, which are so necessary in understanding simultaneous events and the like.
I gave it a 3 start rating because the book is not as horrible as to give it anything lower than that; but I can't even think of someone liking it so much as to give it a 5. It definitely needs lots of revision before it gets to that level of excellence.

Hope this was hepfull....

First of all - where's the fifth star? Well, since I've encountered this book after studying mechanics, I really can't testify to its value as an introductory book, nor to its internal consistency. So I'll withhold that fifth star. As for the other four - this book is my favorite mechanics book out there, not because it teaches mechanics in some wonderful way, but because of two other reasons: 1. it contains many illustrative examples, which are not to be seen in any other book. These examples help clarify many physical concepts and, well, they're extremely interesting and entertaining in their own right! 2. The problems at the end of each chapter are simply the most thought-provoking and challenging problems I've even encountered. I think no other problems have made me reconsider the mechanics I've learned as much as these have. Hey, some of them remain unsolved to this day! I might also add that this book also offers some parts which are almost never found in other books: 1. an IN-DEPTH discussion of rigid body motion in 3d, and 2. Transformation theory and special relativity. This offers the freshman a chance of studying this key-idea in physics.

Wow, here it is at Amazon.com. The textbook used for "Advanced" freshman physics/mechanics at MIT. I first used Kleppner's book when it was a collection of notes in a binder. It was not for sale at the bookstore; you bought it at the Undergraduate Physics office for, [$$$] I recall.

But here's the real point: this book, and its wonderful set of homework problems, was written for freshman completely and thoroughly trained in differential and integral calculus. After all, mechanics is all about calculus. I have read many science book reviews here at Amazon, and I am getting the impression that there are many well-prepared students out there, and that calculus is a second language by high school graduation. If this is true, then forget Halliday/Resnick. Forget Serway, forget Giancoli. If you know your calculus well (and I mean well) and you take Freshman Physics using those books, you have wasted a perfectly good semester.

It's as simple as this: Does F = ma? Or does F = dP/dt? (Where, of course, F, P and a are vectors.) The problems are, indeed, challenging. They require thinking, reasoning and excellent mathematical skill. They do not simply ask you to draw a force diagram, plug in some masses, resolve some vector components and ask you what the net motion is. From my own personal experience, it is difficult to learn calculus and study this book at the same time. Do your calculus first, and maybe even some differential equations. I think this book is not widely used because it is not easy to ensure that 100% of the class comes in with a good grounding in calculus. That is perhaps why it is sometimes spoken of here as an "honors" level textbook.

I will add that Dan Kleppner and his colleague at MIT, David Pritchard (who taught this course for many years) are excellent scientists and teachers. They are not satisfied with the "tried and true" ways of looking at things, and are always searching for new ways to delve into the subject matter. Thus, you will find this to be an intriguing book, with lots of unique approaches and viewpoints. It is very much worth the effort.

In this novel, the second I have read by this author, Daniel Woodrell shows once again how adept he is at capturing not only the rhythms of his characters' speech, but of their very lives. Involved, as they are, in petty crime, prostitution, drug use and gut-wrenching poverty, they are nonetheless shown to be human beings -- capable of love and devotion, even feats of heroism.

The main character, Sammy Barlach, is someone you'd probably cross the street to avoid if you saw him coming. The trouble for a few of the folks in this dark novel -- both poignant and comic, by turns -- is that they DON'T see Sammy coming, or at least they don't recognize the brooding power that lies within him, built up over years and years of clinging by his fingernails to the bottom rung of the social ladder.

Sammy finds himself involved with -- and subsequently taken in by -- two siblings and their mother. Jamalee and her brother Jason are poor but engaging -- they have dreams of getting out of the Venus Holler section of West Table, MO. They have a plan, and now it involves Sammy. Their mother, Bev, described aptly on the inside jacket, 'can turn a trick as easily as she can roll a joint'. Jamalee and Jason abhor (no homonymic pun intended) her prostituional lifestyle -- but at the same time that they resent her for this, they love her, and ache for what she has become.

Jason is a handsome young man -- the female customers at the hair salon where he is apprenticed swoon over him. His sister tells Sammy that 'grown women in the grocery store throw their panties at him with their numbers written on them in lipstick'. Jason's major difficulty in fitting in with his small community is that he happens to be gay -- a lifestyle not embraced by small-town Southerners, to say the least. At seventeen, it is a fact of his life with which he is still wrestling -- and it is painful to watch, as it must be for those who go through it in life. How can he be true to himself and somehow manage to suffer the slings and arrows hurled at him by an intolerant society?

The novel's action builds well to an almost unbearable pitch -- the other Woodrell novel I've read, THE DEATH OF SWEET MISTER, is equally gripping. Sammy narrates the story very effectively -- his phrasing and turns of speech are jewel-like -- and for an uneducated petty criminal with few social graces, he's a pretty amazing philosopher.

The book's finale is as heartbreaking as it is inevitable -- but this is definitely a journey I can recommend. Woodrell is a master -- I'm going to read everything by him I can find.

Those who think they would have no interest in the poor white trash genre would be well advised to reconsider and put this on their reading lists. Despite being gritty Woodrell writes a convincing and sympathetic description of the other side of the tracks: the lumpen proletariat and aimless, and the roles to which they are relegated in society, and specifically small towns. The characters of "Tomato Red" are a small town whore, her eccentric grown children who seek to escape both her and the destiny to which they are condemned as her children in their small town, and the young redneck alcoholic misfit who clings to them. It is crude, graphic, and vulgar, but not excessively so, and these characteristics are essential to effectively painting this story. Woodrell makes essential and profound observations on alienation and the rigid barriers which maintain social stratification, and the savage consequences of challenging authority.

After reading this novel I was prompted to read other Woodrell works. While they are good, this is by far his best so far, and reflects a vast growth in his sophistication as an author.

This is one of those rare books that you keep thinking about after you've read it, and look forward to reading it again. Though I'm always hungry to read something different I found this so well written that I made a point of rereading it when I needed to immerse myself in something I knew would be good.

Daniel Woodrell has been called a "writer's writer," and Tomato Red is a good reason why. He doesn't cheat the reader with lazy or sensationalized tripe. He develops interesting characters, places them in vivid, engaging and humorous circumstances and writes lines you will repeat to your friends or to yourself to make you laugh.

Like his prior novel "Give Us A Kiss," this book features well developed characters whose quirkiness and white trash bloodlines mix to make them full of life and not a little sexual tension.

The subhead of "Kiss" was "A Country Noir." That hits the nail on the head. There's even a message to "Tomato Red" thrown in almost as a bonus because the book is so entertaining you hardly need it. But the message is as timely as it is poignant. Now I'm not going to tell you what the message is. Believe me, it's worth the time to read it yourself.

If I had to recommend one thing to take on a flight from New York to LA "Tomato Red" would be it. You could easily down it during the flight and have some time left to turn on others to it.

Enjoy!

This book is basically what it says. All filled with timetables, it's one huge book that is a chart. It goes throughout history listing the events of the years. Categories include history, politics, literature, theater, religion, philosophy, learning, visual arts, music, science, technology, growth, and daily life. The version available now is newer than mine so it may have more.

It's a handy reference guide for wither self interest or research.

In 1946 Werner Stein published "Kulturfahrplan", or "Timetables of History" in Germany - just a year after the end of World War II in Europe. He was the first to crosslist by year, from the first accurately dated event (4241 BC) tens of thousands of people and events in world history and politics; literature and theater; religion and philosophy; visual arts, music, science and technology; and daily life.

It took another 29 years before the first updated English language edition emerged. The edition I am reviewing goes up to 1978 (published in 1979). Although many more specialized chronologies are now available, nothing matches the Stein-Grun publication in breadth and authoritativeness (leave it to German thoroughness). That explains why this book is still in print with only minor updates since 1975. I have now upgraded the book from 4 to 5 stars, having meanwhile reviewed other chronologies. The five stars rating may suffer from grade inflation (understandably - most people will review books they like) but for those who want to know when practically anything was performed, invented, or happened, or what was going on elsewhere in 1776 besides the American Revolution, this is still the preeminent reference.

I can't tell you how many times I've used this book for my studies. Not only is the book crammed with interesting dates, but also it's organized in a manner that makes it easy to find any item.

First of all, the general structure of the book is like a giant Excel program with the years listed on the side. Each square is separated into different categories such as Politics, literature, art, science and so on. For example, if you want to know the winner of the 1965 World Series, you just find the page for 1965, and look under the appropriate category. The index is also helpful. For each entry, it lists each year the item is mentioned and which category.

I find this book helpful in that it gives one a perspective on historical events. For example, for a history project involving the years 1900- 1910, I noticed that there were a great deal of scientific, social, and artistic events that radically changed our way of life that all happened in this short period of time. I was able to make connections very easily with the aid of this book.

I would recommend this book for literary and theatre students who need to research a time period as well as fans of movies who wish to have a better understand of the era in which their film is set.

I first read this book in the early 1980s, shortly after reading Doctorow's other masterpiece, Ragtime. The Book of Daniel is a fictional meditation based on the trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg during the McCarthy anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s. The Isaacsons, Doctorow's fictional couple based on the Rosenbergs, have a young son named Daniel and a daughter named Susan, and the book is told from the point of view of Daniel, now grown and attending college during the radical upheavals of the 1960s.

Doctorow displays an encyclopedic and detailed knowledge of both of those political periods, capturing the tone of the rhetoric, the pop music, the posters, the idealism, the hypocrisy, and the dilemmas confronting human beings caught up in political movements that seem more powerful than the people themselves. He is as unsparing in his treatment of sixties radicals as he is in his treatment of the cold government executioners who sent the Rosenbergs to their death.

One of most remarkable things about this book is the character of Daniel himself: sharply intelligent yet confused and conflicted, someone who sees all the angles yet cannot bring himself to act -- a modern-day Hamlet. The title's allusion to the biblical Daniel is reflected throughout the text in a number of clever ways as the narrative leaps between historical reflections, allegories, and vivid evocations of moments and events in the life of Daniel, his sister, and their families. It poignantly evokes the relationship between the two children and the various guardians who are assigned to care for them after society has arrested and executed their parents.

The other remarkable thing about this book is its use of language. Doctorow is a great prose stylist. To get an idea of how great he is, you should read both this book and Ragtime, which is a very different work. Ragtime is written in a style reminiscent of an old children's primer--simple, quaint sentences, gentle imagery. The Book of Daniel, by contrast, is full of incendiary language and is a very complex narrative full of jarring transitions -- language ideal, in other words, to capturing the feel of the political periods and events that are the subject of the book.

This is the first book of Doctorow's I have read. Looking at his other books, I wasn't quite sure what to expect. But it certainly wasn't this. Doctorow's work has the feel of Kerouac, Burroughs, Heinein's Starship Troopers, Kesey, and Kafka. He takes an incident from one of the most turbulent and trying times in our nation's history and spins a story of a young man trying to understand the life and death of his parents (executed for treason). Doctorow takes on religion, Disney, and the political and social attitudes of America. And he does it well. Daniel is a man who is both confused and very knowing. He's a radical but not like any you've seen before. Doctorow's style is a little disconcerting the first few pages (he jumps between first and third person, both from Daniel's point-of-view, sometimes in mid-sentence), but after you adjust to it, it seems the only way this story could be told. This is a book you have to read. I didn't put it on my list of "best ever", but it was definitely short-listed for it.

This is the first book I've read from E.L. Doctorow. His style is initially disconcerting because it isn't tethered to a linear structure. Time can't progress without folding in on itself. Even sentences are often interrupted and excised of all punctuation. Perspectives shift between first and third person -- which a previous reviewer noted can be confusing. Yet the book is so saturated in details, the characters display so many nuanced shades of anger and pride and cruelty and love, that it brings the book to a level that everyone can understand. The people in this book are such smart asses, all of them! Daniel's grandmother, the black man in his basement, the pathetic palsied Mindish who we're never quite permitted to hate. In that sense "Daniel" is a politically sophisticated work in that it acknowledges politics and government as flawed and limited structures created by flawed and limited people (like sentences). Daniel observes that his sister died by a lack of analysis. It's evident that an abundance of such is how he hopes to keep living. I left the book feeling like I was cheating myself by not having a mind as active and relentless as Daniel's. I'm grateful for this book. And I'm sort of glad it isn't very popular. Seems to confirm its authenticity.

If you are fan of Daniel Quinn (I am) then you will be interested to see his background. His monastic life seems more like an attempt to hide from the problems of the world than a desire to serve God, and he recognizes it. If you want to read the story of how a man could get from feeling as powerless and victimized as the rest of the world to finally seeing alight at the end of the tunel, this is your book. If you want to know what the light looks like for yourself: read Ishmael, The Story of B or My Ishmael.

Providence is a worth while book if you are a fan of Daniel Quinn and would like to know where Ishamel came from in his life. It is definately not on the same level as Ishamel, My Ishmael, The Story of B or Beyond Civilization, but it is an interesting look into the man behind the books...

Providence is of course a book for those who've read Ishmael and felt enlightened by it. But I think it would also be good for those who feel Ishmael has poor facts & co. It's about the man behind the book, whose life will astonish anyone who reads it. One can't imagine a life being such an interesting story to tell. One certainly can't imagine Daniel Quinn to have lived it. Providence gives a more detailed explanation of what is going on in this world, and an FAQ.

This is a history of various figures in what could be described as western culture. The book is not an original work of history as such but rather a summary of other sources. Books of this type can elicit different reactions. If you have not read about the subject matter it may all be a revelation and incredibly interesting. If you have read about the subject matter it effectively says nothing new and adopts a reverential rather than critical approach to western cultural development.

Another issue is that the book is so ethnocentric. It touches briefly on Japan discussing its use of wood in building but otherwise just deals with Europe. To some extent this is probably because the author's idea is to develop the notion of a European tradition. However of course the reality is that the fashhions of culture and art are not that sealed.

One reads the book hoping for an occasional critism of the normal view of art. The normal view of art is that developed by Wagner in the ninteenth century. That artists are supreme individuals different from the rest. That art has to evolve and change. That art and craft are distinct. This theory of course is a recent invention and it is one developed by artists for self serving ends. The author however is not able to look at art outside the theory and as such the book says little that is orginal.

I've recently completed the audio book of The Creators, from Books on Tape. The 747 pages of copy takes a little over 40 hours to hear. Boorstin's work, while not exhaustive, provides a relatively easy way to become acquainted with much of the art, especially Western art, of mankind. Even anyone steeped in history will find something new in this work, something that may have escaped notice in other efforts. While some regard history as a dry rehearsal of facts, Boorstin seems to put things into a perspective of freshness, one in which a reader can walk anew in the steps of those grand figures of years past. There may be no practical value in knowing all these things but knowing will add to a person's appreciation for things, like music, painting, literature and the rest. This effort, like the others from Boorstin's pen, is worthwhile and will long benefit the reading public.

I have completed "The Creators" Heros of the Imagination by Daniel Boorstein. One of the three in a series. The other two are, "The Discoverers" and "The Seekers" Though my copy is beaten up and falling apart, I recommend this book to any inquisitive mind who thinks that they lost out on a classical education. My reading of the book took well over a year, in little reads here and there, when I could. Absolutely jam packed with useful information about the stuff that I didn't learn in my US public schooling. Well written for covering over 2000 years of history and the creative artists, writers, musicians, etc. and other influential people of the period.

Sometimes I had to set with a dictionary open and ready, just to get through the sections, especially the part on Greek temple construction. The reading of this book helped me to appreciate more of what I've seen in Rome, Italy and elsewhere on my trips. The sections on Dante, Giotto, Shakespeare, Goethe, Verdi, Wagner, Beethoven, Voltaire, Dickens, Sartre, Kafka and others were very revealing and stuff that I had never been made aware of. Everything in the US has been tremendously influenced by Europe and before that by the Greeks and the Romans. Nothing is new, the Romans made concrete 2000 years ago.

Bergner,who I should begin by saying I've known personally for some 13 years, has done an in incredible thing in this his first work of non-fiction. He's written a book that at once takes the reader to a deceptively verdant-death-row in Louisiana (the Prison was formerly a Plantation, think Tara times ten) to the born-again-warden's living-room,to the inmate's families less-than-Tara-like-homes. Bergner has focused all of his novelist's empathy and amazing acuity, and attention to detail on the lives of a few good----though very Bad men. The book becomes increasingly spiritual as the writers' year with the inmates draws to a close---as did this reader's experience of the writing and of Bergner's subjects'lives. Ultimately it's a book that, eventhough I work in publishing and could get them for free, I've just ordered six copies of to give to friends who Dan and I do not have in common.

Bergner has written a brave and fascinating book about the Angola prison in Louisiana. Not at all your standard prison fare, Bergner focuses not on the dark side of prison life but on the day-to-day lives of the prisoners and the events which make their existences bearable. The author was given the unusual opportunity to spend a year, basically unsupervised, wandering the grounds of this dreary but beautifully-set institution. This book is about hope in a place where there is none. It is about hope that is created, in part, by a freak-show-like rodeo hosted by the prison in which the virtually untrained prisoners take the dangerous roles of riders. In a sense, it is a heartbreaking look at the futurelessness of these life-term inmates. The inmates themselves tell us about their life-altering crimes and the demons that haunt them. At no point, however, does Bergner ask us to pity these men and we don't. Bergner's run-ins with the prison warden are books in themselves bringing into the light what we fear most in these situations: even the good guys are bad. I strongly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys non-fiction and is looking for a beautifully written and truly remarkable tale. I couldn't put it down!

God of the Rodeo is an exceptional book. Its novelistic rendering of the gripping stories of men who will spend the rest of their lives in Louisiana's notorious Angola prison results in an unsentimental -- but extremely moving -- story of life behind bars. Without being pedantic or political, the book forces us to confront the fact that while we have a right as a society to incarcerate these men for the brutal crimes they have committed, we have a moral obligation not to ignore them. The book also offers fascinating portraits of ministers who are among the few willing to devote time and attention to caring about these men. Whatever your view of our criminal justice system, God of the Rodeo is an important book to read. Moreover, its excellent writing makes this book a pleasure to read as well.

I worked through the most of this book in explicit detail (the only way to get the full benefit, in my humble opinion), and, while it was very good at teaching the methods for deriving and computing Feynman diagrams, it often sacrifices pedagogy for explicit calculation. For instance, while there is a brief discussion of representations of the Lorentz group, the book gives no indication of how to construct and work with fields of higher spin. Also, I found their discussion of the LSZ reduction formulae rather impenetrable. (Their discussion of BRST symmetry, in contrast, is very readable and easily understood.) So, while I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn to do calculations in quantum field theory, it is imperative that they supplement this book with other sources that treat important topics, like the CPT theorem, general representation theory, and non-perturbative phenomena (which are barely mentioned here), in detail. (Also, there are a rather large number of unfortunate typos in the first edition...)

This is a difficult book to review. That a detailed study of several textbooks is needed for a thorough introduction to QFT is a well-known maxim among students of the subject. Every QFT text excels in some areas and struggles in others, and Peskin and Schroeder's book (P&S) is no exception. P&S chooses to emphasize performing calculations in the Standard Model (SM), and the chapters pertaining to this topic are excellent. Chapters 5 and 6, covering tree and one-loop calculations in QED, are invaluable, as are chapters 20 and 21, which detail the electroweak theory.

Several of the formal aspects of QFT are shunted in P&S, as must something be neglected in every QFT text that is stable against gravitational collapse. The general representation theory of the Lorentz group is the most glaring omission in P&S. Chapter 1 of Ramond's "Field Theory: A Modern Primer" treats this topic quite well. The LSZ reduction formulae are derived and discussed more clearly in Pokorski's "Gauge Field Theories", as are BRST symmetry and free field theory. For those interested in undertaking detailed phenomenological studies of the SM or some extension thereof, Vernon Barger's "Collider Physics" is also recommended.

Despite its shortcomings, P&S remains the best QFT reference currently available. It's the book I turn to first when confronted in research papers with field theoretic puzzle that I just can't crack. If you buy only one QFT text, buy P&S.

I have used this book for the past five years, teaching a one
semester course on Intro to Quantum Field Theory.
I also taught the second half of the book two times.
I am still amazed by how well written and enlightening this book
is, and I regard it as a modern classic. After a years
worth of study, the student is really able to dive into research.
They know the Standard Model in enough detail to
perform radiative corrections in the electroweak model, and
where the Feynman rules come from in different gauges.
The book is accessible to experimental and theoretical students
in all areas of physics, and drives home all the essential
points. I wish this book had been around twenty years ago
when I was first trying to learn the material.