The book is provocative, thrilling, and important. It is full of good scholarship, although there are some points which are not as convincing as others. It will definitely reshape the way we think about history if only to start asking more ultimate questions.

It raises a lot of thoughtful issues about the role Christians ought to play in the world, and what it means to suffer.

Much of the book talks about self-referential things, an endless source of fun and whimsy, and ties it to similar self-reference techniques in the drawings of M.C. Escher and the fugues of J. S. Bach.

Still, the author is not an expert in logic, and there are some insights he misses, and he makes it sound more mysterious than it really is. But perhaps this is not a bug but a feature. There is no doubt that this has inspired many young mathematicians to wonder at mathematics.

This has many implications beyond phantom limbs for the general workings of the brain, and Ramachandran explores many of these ideas. This may very well provoke a new way of doing cognitive science.

He has some good points, but sometimes overstates his case. Of course every history book has a slant: everything does. His gripe is that it contrasts with his slant, which is informed by Howard Zinn's "A People's history of the United States" (see above). He does us service, of course, in pointing out errors in the history books, and pointing out omissions, but if we include all he points out in our history books, we would also be biased, just in the opposite direction. Some of his claims are not as clear as he makes them out to be.

It would be good to have, as he suggests, many of these disagreements aired in our textbooks so students can learn about considering the evidence and come to their own conclusions. I only hope our students are able to handle that, after years of being spoonfed "information".

Also noteworthy is that he wrote this after researching textbooks in the 80s. Textbooks in the 90s are more likely to include the side of the oppressed and generally points of view that had not been stated before in history books. And typically secondary school textbook writers are not on the cutting edge of scholarship (or they would be publishing scholarly work instead of writing textbooks) and it's hard to expect them to quickly adjust to a changing trend in historiography.

This book, with a compelling plot and heart-wrenching scenes, involved me like few other books do. The author is a true master of his craft.

Much of the rest of the book is similar, starting a Campaign for Typological Freedom, having Mr. Spock interact with Noam Chomsky, unmasking the "English First" initiative, and so on.

It reads like an adventure story. Maybe it's not Indiana Jones, but it may be the closest to it in real life.

Dudley's book attempts to do the same for angle trisectors. It has apparently not had the same effect, but perhaps this is because his book is not sufficiently well-known. Still, my hope is that it will instill a greater enthusiasm for working on unsolved mathematical problems in the general public rather than quell it.

Fundamentally, the book espouses the view that good teaching is not about lecture vs. small groups, and is not about use or refusal of technology, but about teaching in a way that is consistent with who the teacher is. In other words, some techniques can bring a particular kind of good teaching to the surface, but technique is not good teaching.

There is not much said about the development after this, and there are pictographic Sumerian clay drawings that presumably developed into cuneiform. So picture writing is still a possibility as a side development that augmented this process, but it appears that accounting was the first use of writing, not story-telling or law-writing.

Much of this book is data, which the general reader will not want to read, but the rest of the book is well-written.

Dan Freed is a mathematician who has done a lot of work with physics, and has a clear, pedagogically sound writing style.

This is a book for mathematicians, but physicists would probably benefit a great deal from it. It is probably a good book only if you have struggled, as I have, with more standard treatments, like Wess and Bagger, etc. or everything will sound unnecessarily arcane. I would compare it to differential forms: you can calculate with it using indices and Einstein summation notation, as a physicist likes to do, or think of it abstractly as geometrical objects with operations such as wedge, d, and so on, like a mathematician does. If you learn it with indicies you can calculate but you don't feel like you know what is going on. If you learn it abstractly, you feel like you have no hope of knowing what's going on, unless you first learn it using indices, fret about why things work, then learn the abstract formalism that makes it all clear.

By the way, if you don't know what I was talking about in the previous paragraph, don't get this book--it's beyond your level. First get a book on differential geometry like Misner, Thorne, Wheeler, "Gravitation", together with a more mathematical book like Munkres, Analysis on manifolds. Assuming you have a strong background in linear algebra, real analysis, special relativity and electromagnetism.

A negligent father has three sons whom he abandons, but when they are grown they return. They are very different people, and yet at the core they are the same. When it becomes clear their father continues to live in his evil ways, he is eventually murdered.

The most famous passage is a story within a story, the Grand Inquisitor, in which Jesus returns during the Spanish Inquisition, and the bishop arrests him. He recognizes Jesus and tells him he must be executed, since he knows Jesus has come to stop their work. After all, they have discovered how to control people so that they have no choice but be believers, while Jesus in his temptation in the wilderness, wanted people to have choice, thereby allowing them to reject him.

This is a deeply theological book, although anyone can enjoy it. Again, Dostoyevsky asks the question of what makes people sin, and can circumstances excuse anyone?