I had to use this textbook for a US Government political science course. The textbook was very easy to read and went in depth without being boring or focusing too much on one topic. The graphs, biographies, pictures, charts, and extra write-ups it gives are interesting to read. The chapter summaries and review questions are also very helpful when preparing for a test or exam. It's also easy to understand and get a lot out of whether or not the student is a political science major. Overall, I really enjoyed reading this book.

I had to suffer through this book for a online political science class. I had already taken a previous online class and three junior level at my college. This is by far the worse textbook I have had in three years, it probably the worse textbook I've had since junior high.

Biggest Problem:
The book comes with a series of questions from a testbank written by the author. Often a teacher will simply grab questions and use them as the grading method. This normally isn't a bad thing. In this text, it is probably the worst thing a teacher can do, short of automatically failing the entire class.

The questions are written so poorly that it would seem that junior high students were given the task of writing them. Many of them given no hint as to what time period, what context, what specific subject or what person or event they are quizzing you are. Some are even contradictory, asking you to judge the confidence level of two groups at the same time, even when one group has very high levels of confidence and the other extremely low. Some don't even make grammatical sense. I had this one question about Flat Tax that had two correct answers (from the book word for word) as options. The explanation of why one was wrong actually stated both were right. It doesn't get any worse then that.

Some of the chapters seem to have been edited without having relevant questions edited. One question asked about a event that was never mentioned in the chapter and was only briefly touched upon 10 chapters prior and asked for statistics that were never cited in the book.

Some are even more ridiculous as they are complete opinion questions based upon the beliefs of your class. What the testbank fails to do is to give the professor the ability to change the answer to true or false. The author automatically assumes what your class believes and marks you wrong for disagreeing with his opinion about your class's opinion when he has never met any of you.

I've convinced the department head of the political science degree to drop this book from further usage.

Aside from the horrible questions, the book itself isn't very good. Many of its chapters are so superficial that you finish reading with the same amount of knowledge you went in with. The amount of generalizations about presidents, courts, congress and public opinion is outstanding. Furthermore, many of the statistics and charts are poorly explained and hard to read.

Furthermore, the lack of a court case glossary and reference is quite alarming. Trying to understand how specific court rulings and cases changed our history cannot be done without a reference to such cases and short analogies, in addition to case numbers that aid outside research.

If you're looking to understand the US politics, this is definitely not the book to use.