I bought this book when I started teaching English and wanted something more comprehensive and rigorous than the textbooks that I was using (e.g., John Warriner's English Composition & Grammar). I quickly discovered a host of brilliant insights and clearly defined concepts that I was eventually able to put to classroom use and that immediately gave me greater confidence.
This is for the *serious* student or teacher. If you study this book, you will find answers to many areas of English that might otherwise baffle you. The authors are clear writers and generally provide appropriate examples with each explanation. For example, remember the textbook distinction between prepositions and adverbs, e.g., between "up" in "grow up" and in "climb up the rope"? As a boy, I always found this confusing. But when I read Greenbaum and Quirk, I realized that my confusion was natural -- the concept itself, as presented in my high school textbooks, was the problem. To clear it up, the authors clearly explain the concept of a "particle," which includes both phrasal verbs such as "find out" and prepositional verbs such as "dispose of." Once you read the section on complementation of verbs and adjectives, you will finally understand this distinction as well as many other points that you might have felt uneasy with. The authors take on the difficult subject of adverbs (a junk category of English if there ever was one -- but we're stuck with it) and break down each kind of adverb -- even the most obscure ones. For example, consider sentences such as "Oh well, we probably would have lost the game anyway" or "Why, I didn't even notice him leave the room." The authors explain that "oh well" and "why" belong to a class of adverbs called "initiators," and give lists of the other initiators. Nothing seems to escape their notice.
I would particularly recommend this for ESL teachers who want to understand how English really works, and also for native English speakers who are studying or planning to study a difficult foreign or ancient language such as Russian or Latin. If you are learning English as a second language or foreign language and have already mastered at least the basics, it might also prove useful to you. Finally, anyone who is interested in the English language as a joyful study would likely find this a worthwhile purchase, one to set aside Mencken's The American Language, the OED, Fowler, and other classic works that offer inherent interest over and above their practical value as references.
So why didn't I give it five stars? Simply because I think it should have even more examples than it does. As the book stands, students without a very good foundation in traditional grammar will probably find this a struggle, at least at first. I would therefore recommend using a good traditional grammar book, such as one of John Warriner's books (mentioned above) or any entry in the popular "English Grammar for Students of _____" series, and mastering at least seventy percent of it before taking on Greenbaum and Quirk. (I would say that you probably shouldn't put a great deal of work into mastering *all* of the traditional textbook, because the parts that confuse you might be inherently confusing -- just note the problem areas and then clean them up later by reading Greenbaum and Quirk.)
