Cook successfully establishes the mathematical foundation needed for construction with a witty, conversational tone that...
This step-by-step guide to mastering basic construction math utilizes the building of a hypothetical bungalow as an occasion to lightheartedly relate mathematical thinking to practical application.
The need for one more book in a market where a dozen books on basic math for construction workers have been published appears initially questionable. Yet Cook’s book earns a place of distinction for bringing a gently humorous tone and an engaging sense of storytelling to what could be the driest of subjects. Organizing his book around the building of a hypothetical bungalow, Cook brings essential grade-school level mathematical concepts (how to solve for unknowns, distinguishing numbers and units and dealing with fundamental algebra and geometry) into play in the sequence you would need to use them if you were building your own home. This is a particularly engaging read for anyone suffering math phobia. “Solving for an unknown is like traveling to a new destination,” opens the book, and, through the author’s clearheaded examples of construction problems mathematically solved, math becomes a thoroughly charming form of intellectual recreation. Each chapter concludes with a helpful review of key concepts. And sprinkled through the text are Mary E. Scott’s cartoons achieving a remarkable balance between adult sophistication and childlike playfulness. In Cook’s chapter on reviewing how to solve fractions, decimals and percent, the author gives the all-too-gripping math problem of calculating the cost of filling up your truck’s gas tank, a skyrocketing cost of doing construction work. Levity is introduced through Scott’s cartoon showing a depressed consumer pondering which button to press on a gas pump with buttons labeled “Barely Afford,” “Second Mortgage” and “Buy a Bike.” The book’s 17 compact chapters conclude with a helpful list of conversion factors and handy equations.
Cook successfully establishes the mathematical foundation needed for construction with a witty, conversational tone that clarifies math while instilling confidence in a reader’s capacity to practically apply numbers.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2008
ISBN: 978-0979409707
Page Count: 113
Publisher: Freshwater
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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