There are many ways to philosophize. In some ways, I think both of the previous reviewers have forgotten this. Let me hasten to say that I agree with most of what Mr. Ryan says as far as it goes. Every great philosopher needs someone like a Bennett to practice analytical philosophy on their works. Every debate in philosophy should be conducted in the way that Curley conducts his debate with Bennett or, for that matter, with Spinoza.
About the only thing I agree with the churlish Mr. Customer on is that Deleuze is a good read on Spinoza as well. There are very strong French, Dutch, Italian and German commentators of Spinoza who read him from various perspectives in the Continental traditions. Curley himself has absorbed Deleuze. And he has been involved in publishing several collections that are full of those writers on Spinoza.
And, of course, Mr. Customer's sneer about Curley not being a real philosopher "in his own right" is informative about only Mr. Customer himself.
For Edwin Curley is a philosopher and an historian of philosophy and a very sensitive reader who has devoted much of his life to Spinoza studies. He has provided us pitiful unilingual English readers with the standard in Spinoza translations.
And in this book he has provided us with a great intro to Spinoza. The Ethics is like The Critique of Pure Reason. It requires a studious methodology of reading. Part of the genius of this book is that it teaches you how to read the Ethics by taking seriously Spinoza's idea that his book is organizes like Euclid's Geometry. Curley examines some of Spinoza's more challenging propositions by reading the proofs and then following the trail back through all the preceding demonstrations. This forces the reader to really confront some of the strangeness and the difficulties of Spinoza's thought. It is one thing to read Prop. 5, "In nature there cannot be two or more substances having the same nature or attribute". It is another thing to understand how Spinoza goes from there to Prop. 14, "Except God, no substance can be or be conceived". On pages 9-19 of his book Curley traces Spinoza arguments backwards and forwards throwing light on many puzzles in Spinoza's ideas on Substance, Attributes and God. It is a useful lesson in how to read philosophy.
In his chapter On Man, Curley gives an example of another method of deep reading. He traces the development of Spinoza's thought on the mind-body issue in relation to the development of Spinoza's own reading of Descartes. Descartes, in effect, provided Spinoza with a series of puzzles/problems that spurred on his own development. I recently reviewed a book by Beiser, The Fate of Reason, wherein Beiser provides an excellent reading of the changes in the different editions of Kant's first Critique that were the result of reviews and reactions by the likes of Reinhold. This is an excellent method of presenting an argument for teaching purposes. It helps the reader to see any great work of philosophy (which we tend to regard as static monuments) as the result of a lived process of debate and growth.
I will not disagree with the excellent Mr. Ryan. This may not be the best first book to read on The Ethics. It demands much. But it is certainly a book that you should read as part of your Spinoza studies. Along with Balibar and the Continental types. As I said, there are many ways to do philosophy. Praise be.

I don't ordinarily like books that devote too much space to endnotes. For one thing, I hate having to flip to the back of the book to read the blinkin' things. For another, it just seems as though, if you have something important to say, you ought to be able to work it into your text.
But Edwin Curley's _Behind the Geomtrical Method_ is an exception. He's got his main text, and he's got his notes, and the notes are thirty pages long and filled with the sort of stuff you'd expect thirty pages of notes to be filled with. But he has excellent reasons for dividing his text as he does, and it actually works pretty well.
You see, what he wants to do on the one hand is provide a fairly accessible introduction to Spinoza's _Ethics_. That's not easy to do if you have to burden your text (and your reader) with lots and lots of technical philosophical argumentation. Plus he's developed his views a bit since 1969 (when he published _Spinoza's Metaphysics_) and he wants to update his own outlook.
But he needs _somewhere_ to put the technical argumentation, because his _other_ purpose is to disagree with practically every word Jonathan Bennett has written on this subject. Bennett is the author of the absolutely brilliant _A Study of Spinoza's Ethics_, a book of the very finest caliber that subjects Spinoza to the sort of close reading every philosopher should receive at least once. But there are problems with his account, and Curley (who also thinks highly of Bennett) wants to correct them.
Well, for the purposes of this review, we'll leave the two Spinoza scholars to their disagreement (which has essentially to do with how Spinoza thought modes were related to substances). But the reader who wants to see a philosophical debate conducted with panache and chivalry (not to mention wit) will enjoy following up on this exchange. (See _The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza_, edited by Don Garrett, for some more of it; further references are in its bibliography. And don't miss Richard Mason's _The God of Spinoza_ for a third point of view.)
At bottom what Curley wants to do is something Harry Austryn Wolfson attempted with not altogether satisfactory results, and Bennett doesn't even pretend to try: locate Spinoza in philosophical history, and make sense of his philosophy by understanding in context who and what he was responding to. (What two names belong on the shortlist? If you guessed Descartes and Hobbes, give yourself an A.) He does a nice job of this even though I have to disagree with some of his own interpretations of Spinoza. (He reads Spinoza as a naturalistic materialist.)
It's a nice commentary, and it's a good companion for a trek through the _Ethics_. If you're looking for such a thing, I'd probably recommend starting with Genevieve Lloyd's _Spinoza and the Ethics_, but don't forget to come back to this one.

Good work, but I think he (the author) doesn't understand Spinoza deeply enough. Useful for that reason, to develop the contradictions to a clearer level.