Saving the World (Shannon Ravenel Books (Paperback))

By Peter Fletcher and Alex Poon

Latina novelist Alma Huebner is suffering from writer's block and is years past the completion date for yet another of her bestselling family sagas. Her husband, Richard, works for a humanitarian organization dedicated to the health and prosperity of developing countries and wants her help on an extended AIDS assignment in the Dominican Republic. But Alma begs off joining him: the publisher is breathing down her neck. She promises to work hard and follow him a bit later. The truth is that Alma is seriously sidetracked by a story she has stumbled across. It's the story of a much earlier medical do-gooder, Spaniard Francisco Xavier Balmis, who in 1803 undertook to vaccinate the populations of Spain's American colonies against smallpox. To do this, he required live "carriers" of the vaccine. Of greater interest to Alma is Isabel Sendales y G mez, director of La Casa de Exp sitos, who was asked to select twenty-two orphan boys to be the vaccine carriers. She agreed-- with the stipulation that she would accompany the boys on the proposed two-year voyage. Her strength and courage inspire Alma, who finds herself becoming obsessed with the details of Isabel's adventures. This resplendent novel-within-a-novel spins the disparate tales of two remarkable women, both of whom are swept along by machismo. In depicting their confrontation of the great scourges of their respective eras, Alvarez exposes the conflict between altruism and ambition. Julia Alvarez's new novel, Afterlife, is available now. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1565125584
• ISBN13: 9781565125582
• Release Date: April 2007
• Publisher: A Shannon Ravenel Book
• Length: 400 Pages
• Weight: 0.96 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.0" x 1.1" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

poor choice of font; obsolete software references

The material is all mostly valid, and the topics presented are treated in a sophisticated manner. This is not meant as an elementary text in numerical analysis. One unfortunate distraction, that appears on every page, is the obsolete font. By comparison with fonts in more recently written texts, including those books by the same publisher, the printed text of this book appears smudged. Despite the author's claim in the preface...

Atkinson writes the best numerical analysis textbooks

In my opinion, Atkinson is the best writer of numerical analysis textbooks. I learned numerical analysis from him and have used his books every time I have taught the course. The algorithms are written in a combination of pseudocode and Pascal-like language, as in the := being used for assignment. I disagree with the other reviewers who criticize the text for being unreadable. It is completely understandable, provided you...

Knowledge that more people need

Numerical analysis is the study and art of determining how to get high quality answers out of computers with finite precision: in other words, all of them. This may not sound like a big issue - you can always use double precision, right? Well, no. Binary computers can't even represent 0.1 exactly. The numbers are wrong from the start, and go downhill fast. This book addresses the twin questions: how fast, and how to preserve...

Excellent Book - not for everyone.

One of the best numerical analysis books I ever came across. This describes the theory behind numerical analysis, so if you expect to find a lot of numerical examples and written algorithms, this is NOT the book you're looking for. Though there are some examples and algorithm, this is a math book, not a computer science oriented book. So buy this book if you are interested in the mathematical theory and ideas behind numerical...

Excellent introduction to numerical analysis

Out of some 7 or 8 numerical analysis texts from which I have learned or taught, this is easily the best. Its organization is standard, its exposition is excellent, it is comprehensive in its coverage of introductory topics, it has a very good bibliography, and its problems are very good. It is a good introduction for graduate students; it is a little advanced for most undergraduates, though strong undergraduates would...