Democracy Under Pressure: An Introduction to the American Political System

For a textbook, this has to be the best one around on the topic. I had to get it for intro to U.S. govt and found it to be astonishingly interesting for what it was. There's really not much more to say. It's relevant, uses numerous up-to-date examples (if you have the 2004 election update edition), AND is easy to read. There's not much more to be asked from a textbook on the generally boring subject of government. I couldn't imagine having a better book for a college course.

I was surprised at how interesting this book made government. It's not boring like so many other college text books are. There are lots of examples that explain concepts in an interesting way, and there are little side stories about our country's history.Although this book is interesting the chapters are soooo long. I used this book for a 3 week summer government course and the long chapters nearly killed me. I found that I could skip the introduction to each chapter which saved me a whole page of reading. Also, I could sometimes read the first and last paragraph of a section and get the point of the section without having to read all the examples of an issue. The end of the chapter summaries are good, and very usefull to studying for exams.

I used this text as a course textbook for a college class last semester. One of the good things about this book is that it contains a LOT of examples about every topic concerning government that is discussed in the book. One of the bad things that I've found however, is that these examples make the book very tedious - if you are just trying to get straight information (ie: to learn from), and you want to do it quickly, I would not recommend this book; however, if you are seeking to learn, and you learn best by seeing real-life examples, then this is the book for you, for it has plenty of those! Personally, I found it a little too much, but I realize that this is just my opinion, so I don't knock the book at all.

was a good book, a very interesting college course. This book was easy to read and follow.

The format of this book is straight forward, and easy to comprehend. Unfortunately, the beginning of many chapters proved to be long and tedious before actually getting into the workings of government. Although the examples were necessary to illustrate daily workings of government, they could have been cut back.