Instruct: Classify Amazon reviews into positive or negative sentiment
Query: Charting the right direction.

I would never, ever call this book a 'solid basis' for statistical mechanics--that's Landau, or Sommerfeld.What Kadanoff does do, like other great theorists, is make the field seem real. For instance, Feynman's diagrams don't add anything new to the mathematics, but they set the idea into focus in a way that makes you think differently about the real world. Before Gell-Mann, chromodynamics was just a mathematical idea: reading him makes you think there's really particles. And who really understood polarization until reading Dirac?Kadanoff does that for critical phenomena. Even when he covers the material in a uselessly glossy way, he sets the theory on its feet and opens up the idea for more work. I've gotten tons of ideas from reading him.