When I interviewed Garbage for The Sunday Times in April 1998, I showed them this book, and they guffawed at the photographs. "These pictures are so-oooo lo-fi," pronounced drummer Butch Vig, suggesting the publishers had carefully selected the worst exposures from their past photo shoots. Best of all is a full-page black-and-white shot near the middle (there are no page numbers in this after-dinner-mint-slim volume) of a guitarist who has NOTHING AT ALL TO DO WITH THIS BAND. If anyone knows who this blissed-out cuckoo in the Garbage nest is, please let me or the band know. Picture gripes aside, it's not a bad piece of work. The text is quite thorough for a cuttings job - Stuart Coles has done more reading around the subject than a lot of cash-in merchants feel obliged to do. Not total garbage, then.

I ordered this book over Amazon.com, and I just got it yesturday. Sorry to say, but I was sort of disappointed when I got finished reading it. Yes, it was interesting and neat to see all of the pics, but I still don't think it's worth buying. I also ordered another book of Garbage called Garbage: The Darker Religion. NOW, that's a great book! That covers just about everything I need to know about my favorite band...GARBAGE!

this book has nothing interesting. thats all i can say. its definatly not something you'll read and read again.

This is a lousy solutions manual. It frequently skips steps and gives you no indication that it did - you're left saying "Where the heck (or something more colorful) did that come from?" After lots of beating your brains out, you might be able to figure it out if you're good at this or if you have a great teacher. If not, don't expect this manual to be a good learning tool - it isn't. You can use it to check the answers on homework, but that's almost all. And since the answers are in the back of the book, why bother? And the Teacher's Manual isn't any better, just more of it. Of course, the book's no prize, either. You might want to sign up for a math section that uses a different book!
If you know you're going to need help, save the $40 for this book and pay a tutor instead.

Good enough explanations but not worth to buy. You would get more by asking classmates and proffesors. Just stay tuned in class.

This text is a good companion to the textbook. Starting with the early chapters, it explains every problem in great detail. Many of the problems are often accompanied by word explanations, which make things easier to understand. This textbook was my first calculus book and this companion helped me to understand calculus much better. There were two things I didn't like about this book. 1) It contains the answers only to the odd problems. 2) When you get to the later chapters in the book, it often skips algabraic steps leaving you with wonder as to how a certain step was reached. Even though it has these two flaws, it will generally help you out a lot if you are new to calculus

This book is constructed in a way that is very similar to IRS and tax law documents. It does contain accurate and specific information about IRAs, but is not user-friendly. It is difficult to understand (not written for a lay-person) and constructed in an outline type format that is difficult to manuever. If you are looking for a book to help you with IRA withdrawal information, this one is not it.

As the previous review suggests, this book is not an easy read. Unfortunately, this is not the author's fault! The rules governing the distribution of retirement plan assets are extremely complex--and purposely so! The more complicated they are, the more likely the "average" joe will make a mistake and have to pay the Government more. But, it is an excellent resource for people trying to make sense of this complex subject. If you are a CPA or other advisor trying to help a client, this is an excellent "library" book.

This is an old collection of games. The first games are from the MacDonnell - La Bourdanaisse match of 1834. The last games are from 1951. The book is in old descriptive notion. Coles is the author and Reinfeld simply checked the annotations. Coles was looking for hard fought games and not necessarily the most briliantly played games which makes this an interesting collection. There is almost a minimal amount of annotations and diagrams. Chernov's Most Instructive Games of Chess is from about the same period and certainly a better buy than this.

I played through all the games in this book. Well, every game is indeed a battle. But a lot of them are not in a high level from a viewpoint of strategy. Don't expect to learn much useful from this book, it's only for entertaining.

This is a good example of how NOT to write history. In about 200 pages we have a brief over-view of the whole history of France. Unfortunately, Cole tries to say too much--too many names and dates. In order to get all his names in Cole has little room left to explain anything important about history: wars "break-out" and artists "come to" Paris. Why any of this happens is without explanation.
Even for the traveller with a passing interest in the history of France, this book in inadequate. There is no special attention paid to places of interest to travellers; there is little mention of the great artists and cultural figures of France, and the history included in often written in an uninspired manner that will bore most readers.
If you are going to France and what some history, look elsewhere.

This is an excellent book for pre-trip reading or to include on your trip if you have space as you'll refer to it frequently. France for the general reader, not the French History expert.

This book is horrible!! The explanations are needlessly wordy and don't do much to improve my understanding of math. Also, the homework is poorly designed: instead of building each new problem on older ones, everything is a scattered mess. Professors, please don't use this book just because you know Swokowski has been writing textbooks forever and he's the standard you're used to. I'm a GOOD student and I can safely say that this book is worthless.

The person who wrote the first comment for this book was exactly correct. Another thing worth noting that runs along the same lines is that the examples do not prepare you for problems that follow. The problems which are demonstrated are signifficantly easier. For instance the book might show you how 1+1=2, yet you are expected to problems such as (4/2)+(3/6)=?.

There may be other precalc texts as good as this, but there can't be any better ones. The discussion of algebra, functions,trigonometry, series, and analytic geometry is exemplary. One might quibble with the choice of problems as they are all of the routine (i.e. drill) variety. I don't understand the gripes of the other reviewers. The discussion of topics is lucid, and there are numerous solved problems that don't differ from the exercises.

I recommend this text.

This solutions manual has one redeeming factor - for the most part, the solutions are accurate.

However, this is where the benefit ends. The methods for solving the problems are severely abbreviated. Problems that may take 8-10 steps to solve are presented in 3-4 steps, with little reason presented. Often, the answers to the odd exercises in the textbook provide equal guidance. Save your money and get another reference (and a different textbook, if at all possible).

Professors and others who have already studied calculus may find the solutions manual to be adequate - of course, they have already been exposed to the material. So a subset of these folks may say such things as "if you cannot understand this, you are too dumb to do calculus". Thus, though they may be able to solve a calculus exercise, these arrogant ignoramuses are blind with respect to the beginning students needs, so their opinions are irrelevant to the situation. If one is trying to learn calculus, the last thing one requires is the triviality of arrogance. Since introductory textbooks and their associated solutions manuals should suit the ultimate purpose of promoting understanding, this manual fails.

The solutions manual, much like the inferior Stewart textbook (see my review of the text), often reads like a professor's "notes to myself" manual. Some "solutions" read thusly: 1. Restatement of problem 2. Statement of one or two intermediate steps 3. Solution. This book contains many such solutions, thereby providing breadth at the expense of depth.

Though it can be done, a beginning calculus student should not spend much time trying to fill in the blanks in the author's reasoning - he or she should be learning the subject of calculus. I recommend the George F. Simmons Calculus and Analytic Geometry text, or the Anton Calculus: A New Horizon text and its associated solutions manual. ...

I have noticed that most people are NOT happy with the solutions presented in this manual, I agree that some of the solutions may be rather short, but it is 10 times better than being left to the solutions in the back of the text. Bottom Line = It's better than nothing.

Stewart is a rich man from his Calculus texts! He highly esteemed by many academic professionals who often brag about talking to him.
He is certainly not in touch with a student's mind and how it learns; his text is a real turn-off and depletes enjoyment of the subject. I agree with another reviewer, Larson's text is far superior. Thank goodness a friend loaned it to me for the semester. I receive more insight into my homework from that text book than from this solution manual. As if the HARDCOVER text was so inexpensive.

This book kept me challenged. There is good representative material for Surveyor's in training.

While this book will not totally prepare you for the exam, it will give you a basic idea of the format and content. The Land Surveyor Reference Manual is a very good book for in-depth study.

This book is loaded with very relevant exam questions. Most of the topics covered by the test are addressed in this book. The mathematical type problems in this sample exam are very representative of the actual test problems and serve as a good review for general surveying review. The solutions to the problems are straight forward and easy to decipher.

I would recommend this book to anyone taking the LSIT or PLS exam. This was my main study tool when I took the surveying exams. It will really help you out!

Good luck!

I agree with all those who rated this book below or equal to 2 stars.
I don't agree with the author.

His book is only good as a reference book for those who have mastered the contents( for example, the professors who have taught probability for their entire lives and take for granted that every line in the book is trivial. If it is indeed trivial, why bother to write a book! what is a textbook for?)

For my own experience, to follow this book, I have to read everything from Billingsley's textbook!

I completely agree with the readers from Madison and Chicago, I don't agree with the author.

I completely agree with the readers from Madison(Wisconsin) and (Chicago), I don't agree with the author.

Mr. Cole seems to know little or nothing about what the religious mind really is. He limits and trivializes the "religious mind" to going to church and saying our prayers. As if religion has no place in the other, "secular" world. I read the whole book in hopes that Mr Coles would make one interesting point. How disapointing

I like Robert Coles' work - he's been an important influence on decades of Harvard undergraduates, of which I was one. This book was useful in some of his reflections - esp. of Walker Percy & Flannery O'Connor and their strategies for exposing the grande folie of the secular mind in an age when the sacred is often ignored, or even its presence not known of. But the end section, "looking ahead," revealed the underlying flaw of his somewhat rambling book - (were these speeches? they read like it - but there's no evidence in the book these were lectures). He seems to have bought into the "promise" of biology, through psychopharmacology, to reveal human truths and expose our mystery, as it were. So his book reads as an elegy for the sacred, bowing to the human mind here where not before (Freud, Communism, etc.) But, he brought up biology in the first place, in the context of how we once thought state-control (fascism and communism) would forever crush the human spirit - and it did not. What happened to his argument in the case of biology? My own thought, is that he has chosen to make his home at Harvard, which is the nerve-center of the secular mind in this country. He seems to have no self-awareness of this, so accepts scientific biology (Harvard Med School stuff) as the final word -the death-knell of the sacred. This left me feeling very unsatisfied - some defender of the sacred here, he does not earn the high ground to diagnose "the secular mind".

I am a Robert Coles fan. I remember him as the most inspiring lecturer at Harvard with his quiet and sincere voice. That said I have found most of his writing a disappointment. Finally, with "The Secular Mind" Coles has written a book that is accessible; it may not be as stirring as his lectures (which might show just how important his actual voice is), but at least with this book the reader can get a sense of the quirky and exciting way Coles strives to address the most basic human questions.

The reason this book succeeds more than his others is, I think, because it retains much of the spirit of his lectures. Coles takes a few simple questions: what is the difference between the religious life and the secular life? When, how and why has the secular way of thinking become more dominant in the last two hundred years? How do we deal with these changes given our shared desire for faith and purpose? Coles then consider how many thinkers he respects, including William Carlos Williams, Anna Freud, Dorthy Day, and Walker Percy, have responded to these questions. Part of what is unique about Coles is that he had the chutzpah to seek out and spend plenty of time with these thinkers. The result is a book that is intimate as well as profound.

But this book is not without its faults. I don't understand why Coles insists on making his books so inaccessible. For one thing, this book lacks any kind of index. And then there are his sentences. He can't resist the parenthetical. At every turn there is a clause within a clause. This sentence about George Elliot is typical: "She was, of course, decades ahead of Freud, in her acknowledgement, that way, of the unconscious, its raw power constantly assertive, no matter our notion of ourselves as in (conscious) control of what we say or do." (p. 65)

On balance, Coles is an interesting thinker, willing to raise the most profound personal questions about faith and purpose, and this book is a nice taste of his way of talking and thinking.