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Title: Sad that it didn't quite work
Review: I would find a good "genetic" approach to the calculus extremely valuable, and Toeplitz seems perfect for the job: a big German professor of the classical tradition who says all the right things in the preface, and who throws around quotations in Latin that he expects everyone to understand. So far so good. One is all the more dissapointed then when it turns out that the book simply isn't that good. It covers the calculus from the Greeks and stops after Newton (it seems that there was meant to be a second volume). The topics are the usual ones. Certainly one could learn a lot of calculus from this book, and certainly there are many interesting historical remarks, but the unity of the two does not reach the great heights we had hoped. One can achieve pretty much the same effect by simply pasting together a calculus history book with any old calculus textbook.
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