Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

It's always difficult for a beginner to review a textbook, because there's always the chance that your reactions are entirely offbase. It is possible that some people, trying to learn to hold their breath longer while underwater will value 360 pages of advice as "Getting Dressed. Start by putting on the trousers: insert the legs, first one then the other," and "We complete the scaling of the existential levels by passing to the colour violet, where we stabilise a contact with our most intimate reality, that which we call the spiritual dimension," while foregoing any significant discussion of strategies for dealing with the sensations of holding your breath. To me, this book is infuriatingly short of relevant information. Not only do you get advice on how to put on pants, there are sections that seem relevant (the 2.5 pages on the circulatory system, say), that jump between streams of grade-school exposition ("The heart is a hollow muscle that has the capacity to function like a pump; expanding and contracting, it sucks blood that is delivered continuously by the veins and pushes it to the peripheries of the body through the arteries....") and trivia ("...[blood] is propagated by their elastic walls at a velocity of 9 meters per second. However in the arterioles of the periphery the velocity drops to one millimetre per second....") without actually introducing any relevant facts (does blood velocity have something to do with freediving? Maybe. I wouldn't know it after reading this book. And the book is packed with clearly irrelevant information, such as 2 pages on the Beaufort wind scale). To reconcile my reaction with the 5 star reviews from those who can do statics of 5+ minutes and so forth, I can only say that perhaps they skipped the trivia, don't need practical advice on breath holding, and valued specific advice on, say, finning technique. The 30 pages of chapter 11 "Training for Apnea" will _possibly_ take less time to read than finding equivalent advice on the Web, but are hardly worth $40. For me, this book was an utter waste of money.