I would like to know more about this book. Miniatures is too general. Is it about Doll houses or Military /Fantasy lead Figures.?

The book is an introduction to painting miniatures (portraits, landscapes, animals, still life scenes) in oils, watercolours and gouache. I found it very useful in discovering the techniques used and being able to follow examples given by a number of expert British miniaturists.

Interesting book if you are 12 years old. It wasn't what I expected but it did contain some interesting information.

Margaret Thatcher was a very unique individual that stood out for her qualities as a leader. She was often called the iron-willed leader, which brought her confidence in her terms of service as Britain's Prime Minister. She often tried to point out that she would try to make as much of an impact on society as did other previous Prime Ministers such as, Harold Macmillan, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, and Edward Heath. According to newspaper men in Britain, she did just that. During her years of service, inflation rose as well as unemployement but this was not part of her doing. The country of Britain had already slipped into a sort of depression and this just dragged Thatcher down in with it. But she did everything in her power to help drag Britain's economy back onto the positive side. One of her favorite quotes, which really displays her will to work for Britain when she was Prime Minister is this, "Let me give you my vision: a man's right to work as he will, to spend what he earns, to have property, to have the state as a servant and not as a master; these are the British inheritance".

This disappointing, earlier effort by Ms Evanovich is a mismatch of romance, humor, mystery and shallow characters. In her later "Stephanie Plum" stories, she found a balance of these elements that is quite enjoyable. This time out, only her most dedicated fans will be pleased.

At its heart, "Full House" is a romance novel: A Cinderella story of love at first sight. But the simple charm of two people falling in love is overwhelmed by seemingly endless passages directly relating their thoughts, doubts and misunderstandings.

The oddball characters that are so much fun with Stephanie Plum are jarring and distracting here. Their primary literary purpose is -- apparently -- to create gaps between the aforementioned passages about the inner thoughts and feelings of the protaganists.

There is a mystery of sorts, but it's entirely incidental, simplistic and disengaging. And the resolution is not much more than "then they were all run over by a bus".

All the characters are shallow, cardboard cutouts. At no time did their actions reveal a deeper, believable person. This is ironic considering the amount of ink devoted to inner thoughts. In the Plum novels, the shallow characters make the fun, fun. (If we empathized with Lulu or Stephanie, we'd cry when their cars blew up.)

"Full House" was an experiment in mixing romance, screwball characters and a bit of mystery together. It failed. Thankfully, Ms Evanovich learned from her experience and got it right the next time.

"Full House" by Janet Evanovich is a re-printed and re-written version of an early romance novel by the author of the hugely popular Stephanie Plum mystery series. And in my opinion, it's because of the fact that the majority of the people buying this book are mystery fans, not romance fans, that "Full House" has gotten such a bad reputation. It is mismarketing by the publisher and bookstores to house this book in the mystery section, which was where I found it, but as light and fluffy romances go, "Full House" is not half bad. And this book is undeniably a romance novel. As far as a rating goes, I'm wavering between three and four stars. I honestly did enjoy the story and found myself completely entertained by this light and amusing tale. But there were a few things that took away from my enjoyment, most notably, the atrocious editing job. There were glaring errors scattered liberally throughout the book, including the changing of some main characters names! I'd like to give "Full House" four stars, because I really did like it, but because of the markedly poor editing I'm dropping it down to three (if I could I'd compromise with ***1/2).

"Full House" tells the story of Billie Pearce, a divorced mother of two who finds herself lonely and bored when her children go away on vacation with their father. Deciding to try something new, Billie signs up for polo lessons. The actual polo is a disaster, but her polo instructor, wealthy playboy Nick Kaharchek, is another story. After having her foot stomped on by a horse, Billie is taken to the hospital by Nick, and their fascination with one another begins.

Used to sophisticated and snobby women, Nick is drawn to the lovely, warm, and real Billie. And Billie finds Nick irresistible, though she's sure a handsome, rich, and exciting man like him would never be interested in her. But there is an intense chemistry that sparks between them, that neither Nick nor Billie can deny, and they begin a fun, romantic, and somewhat unusual courtship.

Things start to get crazy when Nick convinces Billie to let his cousin Deedee stay with her until her upcoming wedding, and Billie inherits a redheaded whirlwind! Billie finds Deedee utterly exhausting, and quite annoying, not to mention the presence of her enormous fiancé, wrestler Frankie the assassin. Billie's not quite sure how things got so out of control, but she knows that Nick Kaharchek is to blame. Not that she's able to stay mad at him.

And Nick has lots of problems worse than Deedee, including her cousin Max, a young genius in hiding on Nick's vast property, on a mission that involves blowing things up and generally running amok. Billie finds this a little frightening, but she has other things to worry about too, like Nick's jealous and nasty ex-fiancée. Add in Billie's bug-killing neighbour and a touch of mystery near the end, and you have yourself an offbeat, light, and pleasant romance.

There isn't a whole lot of conflict between the main characters, nor in the story as a whole, really. It's just a quick and fun read that can be read, enjoyed and then most likely forgotten. "Full House" isn't a fabulous, standout novel, but it's not awful either. My advice is that even if you're a big Evanovich fan; if you don't like romances, don't read this book. But if you enjoy romances and non-demanding, feel-good tales then "Full House" is worth the read.

This is a light and endearing early work by the author of the outrageously funny Stephanie Plum series. It's a bit unfair to compare this book with the Plums. (It's unfair to compare most anything with the Plums.) "Full House" is romantic, sweet natured, and doesn't have what so many romance writers feel is the necessary plot device of having the main characters hate or mistrust each other halfway through the book. No angst.

How can you dislike a book that is well written and has a housewife as the romantic lead character? Go Billie! Snag that gorgeous guy with homemade chocolate chip cookie fumes. Who says that being a normal, well-adjusted family isn't a guy magnet?

Evanovich teases the reader with the kind of off-the-wall characters she'll use so well in the Plum series. Nick's nephew Max, the teenage bomb-mixing genius, and his gorgeous older sister DeeDee, engaged to a wrester, are just the sorts of characters you expect to explore in an Evanovich book. She does the characters better now, but these are a great offbeat touch to balance Billie's middle-class life. The way Billie and Nick adjust to each other's families is what makes the book fun to read. So read it!

All these one-star reviews are dead on. Oddly, though, from a mathematical perspective, if you add them all up, they only amount to about a half a star. That's how awful even the mere conception of this book is. If you have any doubts, let me offer one thought that I don't see presented so far: Do you really think it's just happenstance that this book only exists now that the three principals are dead? Tennant would have had her tail sued off had she tried something like this in Hughes' lifetime.

This book is in spectacularly bad taste. The "fictionalizations" is spiteful, jealous, transparently vindictive, and very badly written. So much so it is almost laughable in places.

The author does not appear to understand that slandering someone is rhetorically very difficult-- usually the reader will see through the attempt, and end up sympathizing with the one being slandered.

She particularly loses credibility in her portrayal of Clarissa Roche-- presented in this book as an almost angelic presence in Plath's life, with no gray areas. By golly, look at that! The book is dedicated to Roche! Uhmmm.. just how stupid does she think her readers are?

My benefit of the doubt points for both Plath and Hughes have skyrocketted.

The reviews below giving Emma Tennant's lyrical and lovely novel of the lives of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes low scores are clearly from Slyviaphiles with axes to grind. Yes, Emma Tennant dated Ted Hughes in the 1970s, but that doesn't make a whit of difference in her beautiful rendering of one of the last century's most celebrated love triangles. I savored every word and can't wait for the movie to come out.

Most of the other reviewers agree: This book is awful. I had to buy other books and always go on-line to find better explanations to do my homework. The authors forget to explain how to do the problems in the problem-sets. They do a couple examples then give about 50 problems or so that can't be solved using the methods in their example problems. Avoid this book when possible, if your instructor is using it, change sections.

...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.

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.

Positives: Gorgeous photos and substantial fact-based descriptions of pre-1971 Mercedes Benz SLs.
Glaring NEGATIVE: Only five sentences and no photos on the SLs from 1971 to the present (350SL, 450SL, 380SL, 500SL, 560SL, SL-class, etc.).
IMHO, if it could be retitled "Pre-1971 SLs", it would rate five stars but, as it is, it was a near total disappointment for this '72 350SL owner.

SL lovers will find Meredith's book fun to read for the pictures alone. Lots of neat restored 300SL coupe & rdstrs, 190SL's and 230/250/280SL's with many nice detailed photos of obscure options, etc. I particularly liked the last chapter showing raw data from the factory about production details. Be aware that the book has numerous factual errors. For example, Meredith says that the W113/Pagoda cars had black engine compartments, including the underside of the hood/bonnet. This is WRONG. Those areas should be the same color as the exterior of the car. There are other errors as well. It is a pity that a book that is so informative and that so many people will doubtless refer to for many, many years helps to spread misinformation. Future restorers beware.

The book contains much interesting, moving and no doubt correct information about its subject. That is valuable in itself.

Corns and Hughes-Wilson don't just offer information. They also argue for a certain thesis: 'Spilled water cannot be replaced in a smashed jug' (Arab proverb), and so any idea of retrospective pardons should be strongly opposed.

The book's presentation of its thesis is so slovenly, that it would be a fine text for use for practice on a course in critical thinking. Suppose you want to form your own opinion on this controversy. Here are a few examples of the kind of obstacles Corns and Hughes-Wilson put in your way:

1There are gratuitous sneers here and there about their opponents who advocate pardons. The reader has to be alert to separate sneer from substance.

2In presenting one of the main pillars of their argument they rely mainly on Arab proverbs and poetic aphorisms such as 'The past is another country'. The thoughtful reader will hope to find a clearly reasoned statement of the authors' position on the tricky question of moral judgements about other times and places. But once you cut away the book's vague rhetoric on this point there is nothing left.

3There are some whopping contradictions to be found if you keep your eyes open. For example.
The authors seem to be saying, albeit rather impressionistically, that the executions were basically OK by the standards of the time. However, the jacket of the book states that the executions were 'Controversial even at the time'.
On the issue whether executions were necessary because they discouraged mass desertion that might otherwise have occurred, sometimes the authors seem to be suggesting that this was indeed so, and in other places the opposite.

4There is also scope for spotting important inferences from the facts which the authors unaccountably fail to draw. They state (p. 103) that 'the death penalty was used only in a minute percentage of cases', and they back this up with ample evidence. Do they conclude that those few who were executed were therefore treated unfairly - perhaps even so unfairly that they deserve a pardon? No, Corns and Hughes-Wilson don't seem to notice that this possible line of debate even exists. As a reader, you will have to spot it for yourself.

On a frivolous note, I can't resist recording that the acknowledgement at the beginning to 'our eagle-eyed copy-editor' contains both a spelling mistake and a punctuation mistake in the same sentence.

In short, recommended to two classes of reader: those who want a library of all the main works on this subject; and those who want something for a good workout of the critical thinking faculties.
Definitely not for someone who wants just one thoroughly reliable work on the subject.