Walpole Books

I eagerly purchased this book after reading the description on the back. It purported to be Walpole's 'masterpiece' according to the Daily Telegraph, and apparently was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction in 1919.

Set at the time of the Russian revolution (for clarity, the second one, not the first) I spent the entire 446 pages waiting for something, anything, to grab me as either a plot, or a central thread, or even a connection really as to what this book was about.

Divided into three sections, the book follows many lives intertwined by different arrivals in Petrograd, Russia, and a family already living there. There is vague mention of a 'monster sighting' beneath a frozen river....there is political intrigue...there is a love story...and there is the revolution. But sadly, none of these themes ever emerges victorious over the others in captivating a reader's interest, at least this reader, and by the end of the tale you are left wondering what you just read.

There are far better portraits of revolutionary Russia, pre-, during, and post-, written by native authors. I highly recommend their works over this one, as it never fully hit the mark, and having recently read my first Tolstoy, I was far more convinced of the landscape painted by him than I was by Walpole's.

Other novels by the same author sound intriguing, but this is, in my humble opinion, not one to get very excited about. His writing style is good, his characters are realistic, but his story overall left me quite flat, as I was never quite able to determine what it really was.

A fantastic introduction to the origins of gothic literature. While the quality of the writing itself is occasionally questionable, the roots which this publication symbolizes is highly important in gothic studies. From the first English gothic tale to the first English vampire novella, the reading of this text is an experience worth enduring.

This student solutions manual has been very handy in my class. I have used it for all of the homework and it has helped considerably.

Pluses:
- Fairly easy to understand


Minuses:
- Lack of hard examples to help you with the hard exercises
- Odd problems (with solutions) tend to be easier than even problems

This is an OK book but too expensive for what it is. I learned a lot from the book. The excercises are good but the wording is sometimes confusing. You have the answers for "odd" exercises in the back of the book, but it looks like that the authors added new exercises in this edition and the answers are in the back of the book, therefore, you don't know if you got the right answer.
You better read some other Basic Statistic book, before you using this book. Good for people that study Science or Engineering.

I am very disappointed with this book, especially considering how much I paid for it... In particular, the book lacks good example problems (it lacks enough examples, period), and is somewhat unorganized. The authors do not explain how to use formulas very well, and they often skip steps and leave the reader bewildered. I also wish there were more answered problems for each chapter in order to test your knowledge more adequately.

In combination with a poorly taught class, I have found the book to be ultimately unhelpful in my efforts to learn and apply statistics. If you're looking for independent study, or just a good stats book, this is definitely NOT the way to go.

This is one of the better undergrad-level books on the subject, and the fact that it's now in it's 7th edition (as of this writing) shows that it's still in use in the halls of academia. My copy, if I remember correctly, is either a first or second edition.

Unfortunately for me, I had a sub-par instructor (and a different text book) the first time I studied the material, and even though I got high marks in the class, I re-audited the class again, on my own time, with a different instructor, the following semester. The different instructor, and text book (this one), made a big difference, and really helped bring the material to life for me ... even though it cost me half of a perfectly good summer vacation to do it.

Let's face it ... probability computations, permutations, and confidence intervals, can be a bit dry (and a hot classroom with no air conditioning didn't help matters), but Wadpole does a decent job of not only covering the material well. There are plenty of worse books on the material out there, trust me. This one's better than others I've seen.

Blood royal is the highly unlikely story of Lady Cecily Fitzhenry, who thoughtlessly gets involved in a Jacobean plot mainly because she is attracted to a young man, is forced into marriage as a punishment, and when her husband loses her fortune in the South Sea Bubble, starts a dubious career as a highway robber and innkeeper. The story started out on a promising note, but lost me the first time that "Lady" Cecily used the F-word. Sorry Diana, you did a lot of research into the historical background for your story; why didn't you extend it a little further to find out how ladies of the 18th century actually spoke and behaved? I stopped reading at that point and skipped to the last chapter, which held no surprises. This one is going straight back to the used bookstore!

This book by B.W.Hill is concerned almost exclusively with the day-to-day political bickering in the English parliament, and almost exclusively focused around the persona of Sir R. Walpole.
The author fails to take a step back and give us a bigger perspective, and on a tenure as extended in time as that of Sir Walpole, this lack damages the readability of the book.
World events related to parliamentary politics, dynastic lines, trade and religious issues, are pretty much assumed known by the author, who practically gives no such broad perspective aside from tangential mentions to justify political positions.

This book can be useful to someone who already knows a lot about Sir Walpole and his period, and wants to fill specific gaps on his parliamentary activity, but to the general reader it is dense and of little use.

Wow, what a tremendous disappointment! Big coffee table book, feels hefty, looks like it'll be a treasure trove of Gothic architecture . . . and yet not. The entire book has exactly ONE full-page, full-color photo of the interior of Strawberry Hill. The rest of the book is more like a scholarly work, with small photos of wallpaper fragments, engravings of Walpole and his family and friends, close-ups of some interesting bits and piece of architectural detail, and lots and lots of text. There's nothing wrong with that; but what a false carrot to dangle in front of the architecturally-inclined reader ("Gothic" and "castle" together in one title--be still, my heart!). If ever a book deserved a subtitle, it's this one--and it should have been something along the lines of, "A Scholarly Overview" or something equally dry, to suit the book. What a great opportunity the authors missed in not showing the world more of the WHOLE of Walpole's beautiful castle.

The author's style is so casual and "chatty" that the overall work lacks a feeling of authority. It's clearly well-researched so the presentational failings are keenly felt.