Gary C. Marfin 2008-08-30

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

I agree that this book contains a surplus of words and anecdotes. At the same time, David Berlinkski writes well and reveals himself to be an interesting author musing over one of civilization's greatest accomplishments -- calculus. If you are impatient with prose that doesn't feel rushed or really not interested in calculus as a remarkably versatile invention, then this is not your book. Berlinski would have been, and may still be, a great teacher. Next to taking his class, this book is the best thing. Those who find A Tour intolerably prolix, should, I think, remember that modern calculus textbooks could almost all benefit from going on a diet. These ponderous tombs are not so much intimidating as they are simply comic. Compare them to the metropolitan phone book (which still exists). Imaging carting that baby around because it contains a few phone numbers that you absolutely must have. What Berlinski has attempted to accomplish in his tour is to introduce readers to the fundamental ideas underlying calculus, and those antecedent ideas that form its foundation. All that in a reasonably sized paperback.

Sujith 2008-06-09

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

I can see why most of the reviews of this book in Amazon are either very good or very bad. This is one of those books that you either love or hate - I hated it. The book has a very noble aim - to explain the basics of calculus in easy non-mathematical language to the layman. Throw in history of the theorems and mathematicians as well, and you should have a winning combination in theory. What killed this book for me is the writing style. I abhorred the way in which this book was written. Berlinksi rambles on and on about anything and everything. I don't know why he has to constantly refer to calculus as "the calculus". In summary, this book did not go too well with me.

Bill D. 2008-04-25

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

Berlinski never met a metaphor he didn't like - even ones that are completely inappropriate to the concept he is trying to covey. The substantive material in this book could have been well covered in perhaps 40-50 pages, rather than the 309 pages he fills with a seemingly endless morass of words. He says of his subject "Mathematics is conceived in the fires of the real world, and the functions that bring twitching life to the calculus represent processes beyond the closed coffin of a coordinate system..." Oh PLEASE.

Do yourself a favor and skip this one.

nd 2008-02-11

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

I found it fascinating that there are (at the time of writing) about as many 5's as 1's among the reviews of this book. As you can probably tell by the title, I am not a fan.

I confess that I did not read the whole book: I could not. As I went on, I found myself getting angry at this book, for reasons that I hope will be a little clearer by the end of the review. At that point I gave up on reading the whole book and dipped in here and there.

Here's what I think:

I found the prose purple, precious and pretentious (just like this sentence!-), but that is hardly the book's worst fault. Neither is the interjection of the author's opinions on things unrelated and irrelevant (the comment on the Duke University English Department springs to mind: a one-sentence insult is as inventive as the almost proverbial "your mama" - I find the Sokal Affair a much more effective and amusing skewering).

The worst fault of the book, imo, is that there was no light shed on the subject (nacreous or otherwise), no effulgence... (BTW, if you like these words, you *might* like the book but no guarantees). On the contrary, confusion and inaccuracy abound: the Dedekind cuts chapter is full of them for example - I had to go back to a real exposition (Ferrar's appendix in his 1938 book on "Convergence" fwiw) to regain my sanity. Somebody else pointed out the sine/cosine graph flub. The graph in the chapter on Rolle's theorem shows a function that does not satisfy the conditions of the theorem as stated two pages earlier. I found most of the explanations similarly confused and confusing: I cannot imagine how anybody can learn much from this book, be it beginner, expert or anywhere in between.

Somebody else mentioned that he enjoyed the "historical anecdotes". I 'm not sure that there are any that are not figments of Mr. Berlinski's imagination. Every time that he started a description that I assumed was factual, it ended by being clearly an invention of the author - and there was no way to tell where facts ended and invention began.

The author mentions the comment of his high school English teacher who said (I paraphrase from memory here, so the figure may be wrong, but the meaning should be clear): "Mr. Berlinski, once more you took ten pages to say nothing." The comment to some degree applies to the book. I can only assume that the poor editors who tried to cut it down to something reasonable gave up exhausted at the futility of the task.

So for me, the book fails as exposition or history of the subject. It also fails as entertainment. Is there anything left?

For an example of a book that I think is genuinely informative, honest, useful *and* entertaining, I suggest John Derbyshire's "Prime Obsession." Although you can get a whiff of Derbyshire's (rather quirky) political conservatism in the book, nevertheless the book is always about its subject (the Riemann hypothesis) and never becomes an object for the author's own aggrandizement. Mr. Berlinski's book in contrast is very much about Mr. Berlinski.

Stan Vernooy 2007-08-08

5 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

There are two kinds of people who might read this book: People who already know and understand calculus, and people who don't. The problem is, I can't see how either group is going to benefit from reading it. I can't imagine anyone learning calculus, or even being helped to learn it, by reading this. On the other hand, as a person who knows calculus (well, at least I know it well enough to teach it ...), I didn't find anything in this book that gave me a fresh insight or a possible new approach to teaching any particular topic.

All Berlinski has done here, it seems to me, is to take standard topics from pre-calculus and calculus, and talk about them with a different verbal and syntactical approach from what is usually used. He sort of alternates between an artificially folksy style in some sections, and a mildly pretentious quasi-poetic approach in others. The problem is, there are no really new ideas here - just new language.

One example: he discusses the irrationality of the square root of two, presenting the same proof that all mathematically literate people have seen again and again, and recasts the proof as a discussion between a taxi driver and a passenger. Cute, possibly, but there's nothing thought-provoking about it. If you already know the proof, you won't learn anything new from Berlinski's approach. On the other hand, if you haven't seen the proof, the taxicab discussion won't be any easier to understand (and won't be any more convincing) than the straightforward, formal proof that can be found in hundreds of ordinary textbooks.

Sorry, but this book did nothing for me.