I loved this book. Unreservedly, uninhibitedly, with my heart and soul. I'm loaning it out now to all my nearest and dearest. Perhaps you'll disagree with its conclusions about the applicability of its particular non-linear models to marital interactions, but surely you'll appreciate its subtly saucy asides and its smackdowns on the dirty dogs of qualitative research, those rascals who make hypotheses and draw conclusions without the rigor of mathematics to back them up.

So, as a dilettante and casual appreciator of good writing and good science, I found a lot to like. But I also have to speak out, as a sometime math tutor, of the fantastic quality of its middle chapters. Essentially, the middle chapters go to the trouble of teaching you all the math you need to appreciate their models, from pre-calculus onward. The explanations are so rich, so clear, and so grounded in practical reality, that I think they'd be helpful to a more general audience - anyone who needs a refresher or any beginning student of calculus or beyond who isn't "getting it". The authors don't stick to what you do to do the math, the rote symbol manipulation on which all too many textbooks focus, but what the math itself does, what the math means, and how it relates to processes in the real world. It filled me with a glowing warm warming glow, I have to say.

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