The First Gung-Ho Marine: Evans F. Carlson of the Raiders [Hardcover]

Phyllis A. Zimmerman (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Presidio Pr (April 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0891415653
• ISBN-13: 978-0891415657
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,673,391 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A non-technical look at fractals and why we should care, April 14, 2001

By 

Jonathan D. Decarlo (Thomaston, Connecticut USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Introducing Fractal Geometry (Paperback)

This book was very interesting. It takes a look at fractals and their basic geometric properties and gives a fairly extensive history from their discovery to their current use today. This book is not technical at all and could be read by almost anyone. The best part about this book is that it offers numerous reasons for why we should care about fractals in the first place. It offers an argument that nature is naturally based on fractals and that an understanding of fractals is essential to understanding nature. The book has a comic on just about every page making it an enjoyable and quick read.

Some of the not-so-great aspects of the book are that it is almost too short, not quite technical enough, and has grammatical errors all over the place. I read this book in one sitting and it left me wanting to know more. It makes up for this, however, by listing several books about fractals and chaos theory for you to move on to after reading this book as well as telling you the level of expertise one would need to read these other books. The grammatical errors in the book are numerous. It makes me believe that no one proof read this book before it was published.

Overall, this is a great book to start learning about fractals with. If you are a math whiz, then perhaps you might want to look elsewhere for a more formal introduction to the mathematical properties of fractals, but for the layman, this book is great.

29 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Glitzy graphics, Disappointing text, Broad coverage, June 14, 2001

By 

John C. Dunbar (Sugar Land, TX United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Introducing Fractal Geometry (Paperback)

Was this a Power Point presentation... gone missing?

First, it's important to realize that this book is part of a series of "Introducing..." books from a UK publisher. So good authors were probably forced to follow a bad format.

That format apparently required glitzy graphics which overpowered the book. Each small page seemed to be on a separate topic... much like a Power Point slide presentation.

There was disappointingly little coverage of the math side of the material. OK, there really was next to none. The saving grace was the coverage of where fractals were being used in practical applications.

Let me tell you a little more on these graphics. They were (professionally done) hand drawn cartoons. Mostly of famous mathematicians having quirky things to say about the subject, on an 8th grade level.

Overall, I think the authors did a fair job of trying to jamb an excellent subject into a stupid book format. The problem lies most likely at the feet of the publisher. This format makes sense for some of their other 8th grade books: "Introducing Feminism"... Freud... Jung... Marx... Einstein, etc. How they were able to pull off "Introducing Math" in one of these small books is probably a story in and of itself. They even have an "Introducing a Post-Feminism" book, if the first one was not enough.

This book was not a complete zero for me, as I did learn many new things. It was a fast read, but I think I have yet to find the best introductory book on Fractals. If you buy this book, you'll never have to pick up a pencil and solve a problem, or even use a calculator. It's just all... a quick read.

John Dunbar

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent and fun introduction to Fractals, April 16, 2001

By 

James A. Williams (California USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Introducing Fractal Geometry (Paperback)

Discovered this book serendipitously- It's easy to read, and the witty illustrations pull you right into it. It's a good book because, while it follows a logical sequence of explanation of fractals, it can also be opened almost anywhere and "read in". I will pass this book on, both to adults and young people I know, and they will get a great introduction to fractals!