American Government: Balancing Democracy and Rights

Rating:
Summary: Excellent idea, mostly great, but falls a bit short
Review: This textbook is a wonderful addition to the available textbooks on American government. It provides historical context lacking in most other texts, and does so in a relatively concise and well-presented manner. The American political development (APD) scholarship it's based on works well, certainly much better than the Kernell/Jacobson textbook. Their framework of democracy versus rights, however, does not come off quite so well as they would like, sometimes obscuring the larger point they are trying to make in each chapter. Sometimes the writing, in an attempt to be concise, may be a bit too dense for some students to grasp. Overall this is a great text, with the added bonus of being easy to carry around (shaped like a real book, not a huge textbook).

Rating:
Summary: Excellent idea, mostly great, but falls a bit short
Review: This textbook is a wonderful addition to the available textbooks on American government. It provides historical context lacking in most other texts, and does so in a relatively concise and well-presented manner. The American political development (APD) scholarship it's based on works well, certainly much better than the Kernell/Jacobson textbook. Their framework of democracy versus rights, however, does not come off quite so well as they would like, sometimes obscuring the larger point they are trying to make in each chapter. Sometimes the writing, in an attempt to be concise, may be a bit too dense for some students to grasp. Overall this is a great text, with the added bonus of being easy to carry around (shaped like a real book, not a huge textbook).