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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