Review: A Graphical Approach to College Algebra

A Graphical Approach to College Algebra by John Hornsby

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



Now that my OCC campus has retired this text, I can reflect back on teaching through it over a few years. I basically found this passable with notable awkward parts. For instance, Square Root Property is not admitted until half way through the text when it should be at beginning. Also, breaking up core material on systems of equations between chapters and appendices is schizophrenic.

Things I like include a focus on basic functions and transformations, basically the "graphical approach" in the title. This makes it convenient to highlight key connections between functions, their graphs, and set basis.



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Review: Cony-Catchers and Bawdy Baskets: An Anthology of Elizabethan Low Life

Cony-Catchers and Bawdy Baskets: An Anthology of Elizabethan Low Life by Gamini Salgado

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



This was an incredible and different book; a compendium of literature born of and documenting the organized Elizabethan criminal class. I was intrigued by the varied taxonomy of "cony-catching" cons and crooks from common pickpockets and prostitutes to more exotic varieties like those hook things with poles through windows, the "jarkman" vagabond counterfeiter of documents (as licenses, passes, certificates), and illegal coal crews. The horse thieves ("priggers of prancers" as in the colorful slang terminology, glossary on 146) played a role like long-term car thieves, including obscuring marks then as someone would w/VINs now. It seems whenever I read of an epoch's crime body, there is likely an element of disaffected veterans that were not successfully re-integrated into society. Among the ways that shows here is the heavies, the "rufflers".

Then there is "co" (pp. 66, 138), apparently a boy, a rogue, or both. Why can't this 2-letter word be legal in Scrabble and Words With Friends?!

It amazes me how much social engineering, a hallmark of spearphishing and more today, was so important to these crooks. Also, the editors' decisions between footnotes and endnotes is schizophrenic.



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Review: The Poison King: The Life And Legend Of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy

The Poison King: The Life And Legend Of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy by Adrienne Mayor

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



An amazing story of a poison-obsessed resister to Roman imperial domination. With Hannibal (who can be senses, off stage) and Jugurtha, he completes the trinity of scourges of The Empire. The scholarship and archaeology that supports this biography is impressive and adds to this work which is very readable and not dry and textbook-like.

The epilogue speculations on Mithradates cheating death and then his final wife Hypsicratea persisting in secret posing as a male historian strikes me as fanciful and detracts from the more sober tone of the rest of the book.



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Review: Cony-Catchers and Bawdy Baskets: An Anthology of Elizabethan Low Life

Cony-Catchers and Bawdy Baskets: An Anthology of Elizabethan Low Life by Gamini Salgado

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



This was an incredible and different book; a compendium of literature born of and documenting the organized Elizabethan criminal class. I was intrigued by the varied taxonomy of "cony-catching" cons and crooks from common pickpockets and prostitutes to more exotic varieties like those hook things with poles through windows, the "jarkman" vagabond counterfeiter of documents (as licenses, passes, certificates), and illegal coal crews. The horse thieves ("priggers of prancers" as in the colorful slang terminology, glossary on 146) played a role like long-term car thieves, including obscuring marks then as someone would w/VINs now. It seems whenever I read of an epoch's crime body, there is likely an element of disaffected veterans that were not successfully re-integrated into society. Among the ways that shows here is the heavies, the "rufflers".

Then there is "co" (pp. 66, 138), apparently a boy, a rogue, or both. Why can't this 2-letter word be legal in Scrabble and Words With Friends?!



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Review: House of Cards

House of Cards by William D. Cohan

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



The first third of this book is a good, even exciting, read about the sudden, catastrophic collapse of of Bear Stearns. The remainder is a, possibly necessarily so, tedious read of this history of a somewhat ousider firm's rise and construction. Herein there are entertaining flashes of interest from the colorful micromanager Alan Greenspan and other execs and the frantic deals to try and save Bear Stearns and its toxic mortgage assets.



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Review: Mathematical Puzzles and Curiosities

Mathematical Puzzles and Curiosities by Barry R. Clarke

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



This Dover original publication is a collection of recreational creativity puzzles and logic conundrums, many of which appeared in the author's Daily Telegraph column. Most of the riddles are visual, of the “move-one-matchstick” type, or deductive of the “how many coins...” variety. Generally, these do not even require basic algebra skills. Indeed, truly mathematical puzzles or at least ones with a mathematical presentation, are in the slender minority here.


(See my entire review at MAA Reviews.)



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Review: Rain and Other South Sea Stories

Rain and Other South Sea Stories by W. Somerset Maugham

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



The setting for all these stories, at least for much of each story, is the south pacific. The themes, all tragic, seem to me speak to the overreach and hubris of a British colonial empire that stretched too its antipodes. For the UK, Eden-like islands allured their conquerors and crippled them emotionally and spiritually. Was Maugham an anti-colonialist?



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Review: Addison and Steele: Selections from the Tatler and the Spectator

Addison and Steele: Selections from the Tatler and the Spectator by Joseph Addison

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



I love to stand in front of and admire the Vanity Fair "Spy" prints at The Grand Hotel when I visit. I love the droll humor and suppose the packed frames on a green wall is a Carlton Varney. Somehow, I thought this compendium of writing from a century before that would strike me the same way. Maybe with illustrations, it would! Addison and Steele could easily have been the Colbert and Jon Stewart of their time, but I mostly found the musings of Isaac Bickerstaff, William Honeycomb, etc. to ring fairly flat these days, IMO. Still, the chronological selections from The Tatler and The Spectator and an important part of journalistic history, and I respect that. The work includes footnotes to explain references and translate the Latin epigraphs which along with content on literature and stage (and a very interesting one doubting the reality of witchcraft) suggest writing for a more educated and sophisticated audience than popular mags of today aim for (People, etc.) making this seem like a cross between The Arts section from the NYT and Mad Magazine.



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Review: Bonnie and Clyde: The Lives Behind the Legend

Bonnie and Clyde: The Lives Behind the Legend by Paul Schneider

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



Ala "Being John Malkovich", "Bonnie and Clyde: The Lives Behind the Legend", this book should be entitle "Being Clyde Barrow". The author's continual imposition of a second person narrative on Clyde's supposed thoughts ("But you think...") merely gets in the way of a rich telling based, apparently, on stitching together many primary sources. In spite, Clyde comes across as a dangerous psycopath instead of any stripe of folk hero. More often than robbing banks, the Barrow Gang took to stealing Average Joe's car and breaking into the safes of small businesses. I especially liked learning the level of organized crime at work, including clipping telephone wires and sharing safe houses with Pretty Boy Flody, and how Barrow's crime spree went back to his early youth as Clyde "Schoolboy" Barrow.



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Review: The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It

The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It by Richard Hofstadter

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Though it is a mid-Twentieth Century text, Hofstadter shows right off in the introduction that he has an intuitive grasp of the American mind: "Since Americans have recently found it more comfortable to see where they have been than to think of where they are going, their state of mind has become increasingly passive and spectatorial. Historical novels, fictionalized biographies, collections of pictures and cartoons, books on American regions and rivers, have poured forth to satisfy a ravenous appetite for Americana. This quest for the American past is carried on in a spirit of sentimental appreciation rather than of critical analysis. An awareness of history is always a part of any culturally alert national life; but I believe that what underlies this overpowering nostalgia of the past fifteen years is a keen feeling of insecurity. . . . American history, presenting itself as a rich and rewarding spectacle, a succession of well–fulfilled promises, induces a desire to observe and enjoy, not to analyze and act. The most common vision of national life, in its fondness for the panoramic backward gaze, has been that of the observation–car platform."

Long ago, Horace White observed that the Constitution of the United States "is based upon the philosophy of Hobbes and the religion of Calvin. It assumes that the natural state of mankind is a state of war, and that the carnal mind is at enmity with God." This is from one of the may epigraphs that liven up this text.

Another of is its intrinsic joys is the implicit commentary on was as the failure of, if not only the absence of, politics. (Take that Clausewitz.) The book goes from the inception of the nation to FDR, chronologically. When The American Civil War rears its head, one chapter ends with the first secession, and the next begins "After Appomattox...". Similarly with WWI & WWII.

This is an eminently readable and educational political history of this U.S. mostly told through the political biographies of Presidents like Hoover and demagogues and politicians like John C. Calhoun and William James Bryant.



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