"... The content is quite classical ... [...] The treatment is less classical: precise although unpedantic (rather far from the definition-theorem-corollary-style), it contains many interesting commentaries of epistemological, pedagogical, historical and even political nature. [...] The author gives frequent interesting hints on recent developments of mathematics connected to the concepts which are introduced. The Introduction also contains comments that are very unusual in a book on mathematical analysis, going from pedagogy to critique of the French scientific-military-industrial complex, but the sequence of ideas is introduced in such a way that readers are less surprised than they might be.
J. Mawhin in Zentralblatt Mathematik (1999)