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product arrived in time, no trouble no hassles.
The only trouble I had was that I ordered three books at the same time and checked 'em all out at the same time, I assumed that they would all have overnight delivery but only one from amazon had over night delivery and the other two arrived normally which was late for me. I wish amazon could change that. ... Read more

Book Description

Customer Reviews (7)

Great low-tech intro
Despite the title, there are no equations and the technical details are all descriptive, but there's lots of useful information. A great first book to read on technical aspects of tennis. If the title suggests you will find hard numbers and research-level information here, you might be disappointed. Otherwise it's really a great book with lots of practical physics- and engineering-based
good advice on everything from racquets and balls to shots and serves, delivered at an almost non-technical level: think physics for poets!

Truly technical
Technical to a fault, but exacting. Provides interesting, sometimes counter-intuitive information, e.g., on how the tennis ball bounces, and how racquets really perform.

Overhyped
This book really wont change your game or provide any revelations. It even has some inconsistences.

Good to know
For the serious tennis player or anyone trying to learn more about tennis it's great.

An excellent update to "The Physics and Technology of Tennis"
A few years back I did read "The Physics and Technology of Tennis."Even though this was a sensational book that gave me the physics knowledge to moonlight as a racquet development consultant, "Technical Tennis" is a great update."The Physics and ..." consists of a collection of papers that were published in TennisPro magazine between 1993 and 2000.Meanwhile, "Technical Tennis" was published in 2005.Tennis technique and technology have changed since the mid nineties.The authors thoroughly study these changes.They do a great analysis of Sampras second serve that remained a standard even for today's pros.They also analyze Federer's forehand that is a marvelof versatility, speed, and accuracy. Nobody hits a forehand using Federer's technique.But, maybe thanks to this book more tennis players and especially pros will emulate it.

The authors' opinions have become more complex and nuanced over time.In "The Physics ..." they stated unequivocally that heavier racquets gave you more power, control, and felt better all around than lighter ones.Now, they indicate it depends somewhat on your playing style.And, they come up with an all around "ideal" weight of 342 grams or 12 ounces.That is heavier than most recreational racquets sold in store.But, it is not heavy vs what the pros use.On page 55, they also indicate that to reduce the force on your arm there are five things you can do:

1) Use a heavier racquet;
2) Use a head heavy racquet;
3) Use a more flexible racquet (not a widebody one);
4) Lower the string tension;
5) Use a softer thicker grip.

These are different recommendations than in "The Physics ..." book.Back then they recommended a stiff racquet.

The authors also study in greater details the relationship betweenracquet weight and ball speed.And, how the relationship is different for serves vs groundstrokes.

If you read "The Physics ..." book, you have to read this one to update your knowledge. If you have not, you don't need to read it, and can jump in straight into this one.It will provide you with all the physics you care about.This book is really not dummed downmuch.Be ready for that.At times the physics discourse gets pretty dry and challenging.But if you digest it, it's pretty interesting stuff. ... Read more

Book Description
John Ashbery writes like no one else among contemporary American poets. In the construction of his intricate patterns, he uses words much as the contemporary painter uses form and color- words painstakingly chosen as conveyors of precise meaning, not as representations of sound. These linked in unexpected juxtapositions, at first glance unrelated and even anarchic, in the end create by their clashing interplay a structure of dazzling brilliance and strong emotional impact. From this preoccupation arises a poetry that passes beyond conventional limits into a highly individual realm of effectiveness, one that may be roughly likened to the visual world of Surrealist painting. Some will find Mr. Ashbery's work difficult, even forbidding; but those who are sensitive to new directions in ideas and the arts will discover here much to quicken and delight them.

A 35th anniversary edition of classic work from a celebrated American poet who has received the Pulitzer Prize, the national Book Award, and the national Book Critics Circle Award. John Ashbery's second book, The Tennis Court Oaths, first published by Wesleyan in 1962, remains a touchstone of contemporary avant-garde poetry. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

When it's good, it's very very good. But when it's bad...
John Ashbery, The Tennis Court Oath (Wesleyan, 1962)

Reading Ashbery's The Tennis Court Oath probably doesn't rank high on the list of many people's favorite things to do. But reading it while you've immersed yourself in a glut of Charles Simic is an especially bad idea. Simic is the quintessential surrealist writing in English today; Ashbery is sort of a weird, fuzzy cross between surrealism, dada, and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E whose work is, by turns, incomprehensibly unreadable and quite good.

I opened the book to a random page and start quoting from the top left...

"You often asked me after hours
The glass pinnacle, its upkeep and collapse
Knowing that if we were in a barn
Straw panels would... Confound it
Te arboretum is bursting with jasmine and lilac
And all I can smell here is newsprint..."
("The New Realism")

Anyone who wants to take a stab at explaining that, by all means, go ahead. I cannot help but compare this stuff (as I did in a recent Jackson Mac Low review) to the work of John M. Bennett, which is completely nonsensical but SOUNDS like it shouldn't be. Reading John M. Bennett is like understanding how to read and pronounce a completely foreign language without understanding a single word; even when you have no idea what's going on, if you read it out loud, you can still do so smoothly and put inflections in all the right places to make it sound great. With this, the reader is reduced to stumbling through, trying to grasp some semblance of meaning in order to make it scan. (And we wonder why people ask "what does it mean?" when confronted with poetry. lord save us.)

But when Ashbery is on, he is quite on, and his work takes on a spectre of imagism; not enough to make the book worth buying, mind you, but enough to make it worth borrowing from the library. The more lucid sections of "Europe," for example, where Ashbery dispenses with the easy, wannabe dadaism and gets down to his subject (Beryl Markham), give the reader an idea of why Ashbery, not too long before this, was selected by the Yale Series of Younger Poets. But, as with many poetry collections, you wade through some swine to get to the pearls. In this case, they're often in the same poems. ** ½

The Unbroken Oath:Ashbery's Neglected Masterpiece
Wesleyan University Press has reissued a volume in its series of "classics" which deserves a place on the shelves of everyone interested in poetry in the last forty-five years.THE TENNIS COURT OATH is a series of experiments in poetry which are as daring and fresh today asthey were in 1962, when the book (Ashbery's second) first appeared.Thoughthe book contains some often anthologized pieces--"Faust" and"They Dream Only of America" for instance--the book reprints theless familiar "America," "Rain," and the 110 part poem"Europe." It is these more obscure poems that seem to offer thebest glimpse of the possibilities of Ashbery as a poet as well as thepossibilities for language and poetry in general.Reading these poems inthe light of Ashbery's interceding success as a poet, the book emerges as akind of rough blueprint for his career.No one who knows Ashbery's poem"Litany" (in AS WE KNOW, Viking, 1979) can look at the paralleltext of "To the Same Degree" in OATH and not see it as thefledgling form of the later work.Even "Europe," which theauthor himself admits was a kind of failure, demonstrates the daring searchfor a method of communication which Ashbery described (in 1962)as"perhaps a new kind of poetry which tries to use words in a newway....to use words abstractly as an abtract painter would usepaint....This has nothing to do with 'Imagism' or using words because oftheir sound--words are inseparable from their meaning and cannot be said toexist apart from it.My aim is to give the meaning free play and thefullest possible range [in an] attempt to get a greater, more complete kindof realism.""Europe," if it is a failure, is a brilliantone, saturated with the possibilities of language which dares to venture,as T. S. Eliot put it, at "the frontiers of consciousness, wheremeaning fails but feelings still persist."It is that sense ofexperimentation, of the avante-garde and the seemingly limitlesspossibilities for the language of poetry that the complete text of OATH,now reprinted, captures and presents to the reader.Those already familiarwith Ashbery's work will find the book an indispensible high-point in hiscanon, those unfamiliar with Ashbery will see a different kind of poetry,rife with new ideas and new hopes for relating language to the world itseeks to describe and of which it is part. John Ashbery's TENNIS COURTOATH, like his SELECTED POEMS (Viking, 1985) is simply a must for anyserious reader of late Twentieth-century and contemporary poetry. ... Read more

Book Description

Jacob Bernoulli's Ars Conjectandi, published posthumously in Latin in 1713 by the Thurneysen Brothers Press in Basel, is the founding document of mathematical probability. Here, Edith Dudley Sylla offers the first complete English translation of this monumental work.

Part I reprints and reworks Huygens's On Reckoning in Games of Chance. Part II offers a thorough treatment of the mathematics of combinations and permutations, including the numbers since known as "Bernoulli numbers." In Part III, Bernoulli solves more complicated problems of games of chance using that mathematics. In the final part, Bernoulli's crowning achievement in mathematical probability is manifest: he applies the mathematics of games of chance to the problems of epistemic probability in civil, moral, and economic matters, proving what we now know as the weak law of large numbers.

Sylla provides an extensive introduction and detailed translator's notes. She includes as supplemental texts Bernoulli's "Letter to a Friend on Sets in Court Tennis" and "Thesis 32" of Theses Logicae de conversione et oppositione enunciationum.

Product Description
Open Your Heart with Tennis shares one woman's story of how a sport -- and the legs of young, fit men -- inspired her. ... Read more

Book Description
Olmstead Press is proud to publish for the first time in paper, Ladies of the Court, with a new chapter by the author and a new Introduction by Frank Deford. The stars of the women's tennis tour are the richest, most famous, and most conspicuous female athletes in the world, and yet the public's perception of them is often limited to the little that can be gleaned from press conferences and photo opportunities. Eager to get beyond the cosmetic image, Michael Mewshaw followed the circuit from Rome to Paris, London, New York, and points in between. Along the way he met teenage millionaires such as Monica Seles, Jennifer Capriati, and Mary Joe Fernandez. Then he talked to their opponents, obscure girls struggling to stay on the tour and continuing to pursue a dream. He spoke with adolescents, anxious about their emerging sexuality, and veterans trying to balance love affairs, marriages, and motherhood with the demands of a tennis career. He had bristly encounters with ferociously ambitious fathers who live through, and off of, their daughters. From sociologists and sports psychiatrists, he learns about teenagers sexually abused by middle-age men, coaches who consider sex just another perk of the job, and the groupies, gofers, and hangers-on who have their own troubling agendas. An acclaimed novelist, Mewshaw captures the essence of the complex characters. A celebrated sportswriter, he analyzes matches, discusses strategy, and describes practice sessions and conditioning programs. He interviews the most renowned coaches, trainers, and sports agents. Most important, as award-winning investigative journalist, Mewshaw is in a position to subject the women's tennis tour to the sort of scrutiny it rarely receives. ... Read more

Product Description
Describes tennis, the skills needed for it, and way to compete. ... Read more

Amazon.com
Though John Feinstein made his mark writing about basketball-- A Season on the Brink is one of the top sports books ever--he's always had a love of tennis. For Hard Courts, he spent nearly 15 months interviewing the players, coaches, managers, tournament officials, agents and fans -- more than 200 people in all -- that make-up the international tennis circuit. What he found wasn't always as pretty as a Pete Sampras backhand. While Feinstein touches on the scandal and corruption that is as much a part of tennis as any other professional sport, he offers revealing profiles of the greatest players and a celebratory tribute to the sport's elegant tradition.Book Description
The new edition of this bestseller in hardcover features never-before-published, all-new inside info on the money, personalities and politics of pro-tennis: Jimmy, Monica, Boris, Martina, et al. Now in paper. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Real Life On The Tour
Though it now reads like a history of early '90's tennis, when this book first came out I pored over it with excitement to find out what the lives of my favorite players were like. All the big names of fifteen years ago are here: Sampras, Navratalova, Selles, Graf, Courier, Agassi, Fernandez, Vicario, McEnroe, Edberg and Lendl. Great champions all. This is set over the course of one full year on the circuit, from the Australian Open in January, to the end of season tournaments that follow the conclusion of the Grand Slam series at the US Open.Anyone who wants to learn about what it takes to compete at this level of tennis can get an education here. Also someone interested in the inner workings of the tour and the agencies that govern it can find out what they want to know. And although it seems odd to say this about one of the most influential books I read when I was so into this sport, it also serves today as the record of a long-ago year in the game of tennis.

Controversial Tour of the ATP Tennis Circuit
It's a nerve wracking sport played at a high level.Different in that there's an opponent standing within yourself and across the net.

This excellent journalist brings his intensity, investigative style and chronicles the sports heroes at the turn of the '90s, both men and women.

Many of the games stars are as high-strung as their rackets.Feinstein paints them all here. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

The tennis lessons you need to know - anytime!
To be a great tennis player you must know more than how to play tennis you must know how to think tennis.It's also the easiest way to have more fun playing tennis. And you will have more fun playing after you read thisbook.

This book is also a must for all those diehards trying to pushthemselves to that next level.Paige covers all areas of the game and doesso in a quick and clear, and often humorous, manner.The tips here are asvaluable as any you'll receive in hours of lessons.

I found I havecontinued to turn back to the book again and again over the last coupleyears and still find it relevant. ... Read more