Classic Reviewer Rank: 1,078
Helpful votes received on reviews, lists & guides:
73% (2,008 of 2,772)
Nickname: glenohara
Location: Bellefontaine Neighbors, Mo. USA
Birthday: April 11(Saved Remind mePlease RetryPlease Retry)
In My Own Words:
I am an avid and voracious reader, a writing dilettante with a dozen novel fragments on my hard drive, who until recently paid the bills by driving a shuttle bus on the campus of Washington University. I'm currently unemployed, most recently working as a bookkeeper for a small publishing company. I'm 50 years old, a dropout of said Washington U., an amatuer juggler, and a father of a 18-year old b… Read moreI am an avid and voracious reader, a writing dilettante with a dozen novel fragments on my hard drive, who until recently paid the bills by driving a shuttle bus on the campus of Washington University. I'm currently unemployed, most recently working as a bookkeeper for a small publishing company. I'm 50 years old, a dropout of said Washington U., an amatuer juggler, and a father of a 18-year old boy and husband of his mother. I'm planning on going back to school to get a teaching certificate so that I can teach High School Alegebra.
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Reviews
Classic Reviewer Rank: 1,078
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You might think, perhaps, that a book that tells the tale of two neophyte hikers tackling an overly ambitious project (hiking the entire length of the Appalachian Trail) and not succeeding, but having virtually no truly dramatic moments, a book that doesn't hide the fact that hiking such a long distance quickly becomes boring even to the people involved, an interminable slog through woods that you're too tired to appreciate the beauty of, able to think only of your next break from it in some small town or rest stop, would be intensely boring to someone just READING about somebody else's boring, interminable slog.
You'd be wrong. Bryson manages to tell the story with sufficient… Read more
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This book accomplishes what it sets out to accomplish admirably; it sets out the basic concepts of statistics with as little reliance on Math as possible, to give students who are not Math-oriented an idea of the subject.
If you are Math-oriented, and already know a bit about statistics, you will not learn much here. But that is not the fault of the book; it is not intended to teach someone with a grounding in the subject, any more than it is a flaw of an intro Biology textbook that it doesn't teach Organic Chemistry.
I have a couple of minor quibbles about this book, but they're really too minor to mention, and are certainly too minor to dock it a star for.
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Excellent story, well written, powerfully moving, with plenty of action, plenty of intrigue, excellent characterizations, good pacing & plot movement. I would have preferred a story that had a more satisfying ending, but at least the immediate plotline was wrapped up as the major back-plot was continued on into the next book. Granted, the chapters that involved Kira's experiences/dreams were kind of jarringly discontinuous with the rest of the story, but I'm sure that we'll see them integrated at some point.
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