Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity (Great Discoveries) by David Foster Wallace ISBN: 0393003388 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: October, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.17
Rating: 4
Summary: Serious meat with silly sauce
Comment: A fascinating, irreverently funny, and accurate (as far as I can tell) tour of humankind's dealings with infinity, with more (and welcome) attention to the history of analysis and its transfinite travails than most other books nominally aimed at the general reader. Tough chewing as a first course (see below for more digestible introductions), but a wonderful second course for the whetted appetite. I'd give it 5.29 stars if an editor had made it read less like a (very good) third draft of an exuberant series of lectures, full of self-directed notes on how to better arrange the material, clunky phrases (e.g., "a nice opening-type quotation"), and idiosyncratic abbreviations. Keep a dictionary handy, unless gems like "apodictic," "horripilatively," and "deracinate" are already part of your word hoard.
Okay, 4.84 stars if you have something beyond basic calculus under your belt (foundations, point-set topology, functional analysis, etc.), 4.41 stars if you can think back (not necessarily remembering much) on introductory calculus without discomfort, 4 stars if you're not undebauched by basic function and set-theoretic notation at the level of a serious high school algebra course, and 3.61 stars otherwise if you're interested in the topic and are willing to skip the gnarly parts.
My candidate for the best general-audience introduction to the mathematics of infinity (both content and style) is Robert and Ellen Kaplan's marvelous "The Art of the Infinite: The Pleasures of Mathematics." See also Leo Zippin's "Uses of Infinity," Rudy Rucker's "Infinity and the Mind," and Eli Maor's "To Infinity and Beyond" for other excellent introductions. Shaughan Lavine's "Understanding the Infinite" and Joseph Dauben's "Georg Cantor: His Mathematics and Philosophy of the Infinite" are, like Wallace's book, more suited to professionals and experienced amateurs (as is, I believe, Edward Huntington's "The Continuum and Other Types of Serial Order," which I'm still waiting for).
Rating: 5
Summary: A Tantalizing Tradeoff
Comment: I think the first thing to be said of this book (or booklet, as Wallace recurrently refers to it) is that it's rather a lark to read. This will surprise no reader familiar with Wallace's literary and critical works. But, unlike his previous works, this one deals with extremely (towards the end) technical mathematics which the author is obliged to gloss over.-Quite a contrast to, say, Infinite Jest.
I was, by turns, frustrated with this lack of rigour, and appreciative of it. I can't put it better than Wallace does in a footnote on pp.220-221, "Rhetoricwise, let's concede one more time that if we were after technical rigor rather than general appreciation, all these sort of connections would be fully traced out/discussed, though of course then this whole booklet would be much longer and harder and the readerly-background-and-patience bar set a great deal higher. So, it's all a continuous series of tradeoffs." - Informed readers take note of his use of the term "continuous series" here!
Thus, Wallace does the best that I think any writer could in walking the tightrope between over-the-top technical mare's nests which only a few members of the faculty at Mathematics departments (and a few autodidacts) could grasp, and what he derides as the "Pop" accounts of such things as the development of Set Theory.-So, nobody, including Wallace, and myself, is going to be completely satisfied. While not a complete technical purist, I do wish he'd chosen to be more technical in some parts and less so in others. As a former student who has always wished his "formal" training in Mathematics went further that first year college Calculus (though I later worked my way through more advanced textbooks on my own), I was genuinely interested in the technical illuminations this book might provide. On the other hand, as an appreciator of fine writing, I know the two do not go hand in glove.
So, in the end, I should say that this book is as good a "tradeoff" as you're going to find. I was pleased to see that Wallace's wit and style haven't suffered from the subject matter. He rather resembles, in this respect, another writer who is more often quoted herein than any other for, as Wallace terms it alliteratively, his "pellucid prose": to wit, Bertrand Russell, a mathematician of first order, whose renegade life and pixie wit served him well throughout his (as Wallace puts it, wryly, in the penultimate footnote of the "booklet") long, distinguished life. Let's hope Wallace's life and output are equally as long and energetic.
Rating: 5
Summary: I, too, have spent a lot of time pondering this.
Comment: Once I believed that the possibilities life offered were, indeed, infinite. I was rushing from jobsite to jobsite, bearing a large zippered portfolio under one bespoke elbow, puffing away on a well-seasoned briar, hollering authoritative instructions into a cell phone. One terrible day, all of that disappeared, and I plunged into a hellish world, utterly circumscribed by pain and senseless violence. I won't go into details, but I was blinded--a blind architect! My soul howled to the heavens, but the cold heavens were deaf to my howling soul. It was then that I framed the following simple-minded question: what, exactly, is infinity? Does it have a smell, or a characteristic taste? Can you get change for a infinity at the laundromat? How long mankind has placed that little squiggly-looking symbol under his thinking cap and sloshed it around in search of an answer! I sit at my lonely drafting table, groping for clues and for the sour lemon drops that I keep in a metal tin. Outside, I hear the hollers of the nuns at the local novitiate, St. Isidore's (patron of the Long Division Workbook). How long have I, personally, been in search of infinity? Ever since I went to hear "Einstein On The Beach" with my wife. She let out with one of her customary shrieks, and then plopped over, insensate. Well, her problems were over--but I had another five or six hours to go. My fingers flitted hopelessly over the braille score the men at Avery Fisher had provided me, and soon trembled with despair: had Glass no mercy? I staggered out of the theater past row after row of snoozing Philip Glass enthusiasts. Well, this is sort of how I felt after an actor friend of mine came over to read aloud to me from EVERYTHING AND MORE, David Foster Wallace's new book, which, as the title seems to promise, is about infinity and some other stuff. The actor spoke in what he described as a "Lincolnesque Baritone" (never mind that Lincoln was a tenor) and recited the opening sentence, but long before he was done I'd "slipped away," in the manner of a southern gentleman, into peaceful unconsciousness. I don't know if Wallace has moved on to the next literary level or whatnot but it seems as if after writing one book about a hyperaddictive kind of infinity he certainly seems to have found an ingenious way of simulating infinity itself in this book. Though this could be a nomenclatural problem and what we're really talking about is interminability. Anyway, now all he needs is to get the addictive part down. My actor friend, incidentally, had to be carried out of our apartment after his recital, though I think this might have had something to do with his need to "slake his thirst," as he put it, after having "performed," as he put it. Let me repeat myself: as much as it might seem otherwise, there is nothing debilitating about this small, lethal book!
 |
Title: David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest: A Reader's Guide (Continuum Contemporaries) by Stephen Burn ISBN: 082641477X Publisher: Continuum Pub Group Pub. Date: June, 2003 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
 |
Title: Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 1) by Neal Stephenson ISBN: 0380977427 Publisher: William Morrow Pub. Date: 23 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $27.95 |
 |
Title: Infinite Jest: A Novel by David Foster Wallace ISBN: 0316921173 Publisher: Back Bay Books Pub. Date: February, 1997 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
 |
Title: The Future of Fiction by David Foster Wallace ISBN: 156478097X Publisher: Dalkey Archive Pr Pub. Date: January, 1996 List Price(USD): $8.00 |
 |
Title: Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics by John Derbyshire ISBN: 0309085497 Publisher: Joseph Henry Press Pub. Date: 23 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $27.95 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
