This book was used as the text for my junior year AP history class, and it is absolutely awful. The book is extremely difficult to read because there is so much unnecessary information crammed into each section and the authors seemed more interested in simply recording facts than making a coherent assessment of history. My teachers agreed that this book is difficult, uninteresting, and poorly edited and are looking for a new text.

I love history and was excited to take the AP History course but I could not focus on this book for more than five minutes without becoming sleepy and losing focus. The book does present accurate and extensive facts covering the history of the US from pre-colonization to the mid-1990's, but there has got to be a better way to learn them.

I am now a junior in high school and this is the book I use as the main textual reference for my AP US History Class. I agree with Amanda, this book is boring (but there are times when the author of a particular section shows a sense of humor). It is crammed with names of people, places and pieces of legislation that are never explained and, at times, appear to be irrelevant. I read a lot of supplementary material, but still do not have the time to familiarize myself with everything mentioned in the book. It is my opinion that some of the space in this book could have been used for better explanations of specific events rather than a place where the author could list everything (s)he knew about the time period in that BAM, BAM, BAM way (sorry, I have no other way of explaining how that book reads, sometimes it's like an index of events, except not alphabetized).

This text provides the necessary background and factual information to successfully instruct the 11th grade Advanced Placement United States History course throughout the world. Included in the text are appreciated charts, maps, and illustrations.

The text includes all that is necessary for the student and teacher dedicting themselves in combination to fulfill what is needed to score well enough on the national Advanced Placement examination to earn college credit.

The 8th edition includes American History well into the last decade of the 20th Century.

I attended the show this book is based on at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and was extremely disappointed. The photographs selected for the show were without merit and neither my friend nor I were able ascertain what the show purported to illustrate, which is the relationship between commercial fashion work and personal artistic expression. I suggest passing this one by, its not worth it.

While the struggle to free Namibia is over, this book still illustrates the apartheid-era view that once dictated that Namibia remain a South African colony. Maddening and inaccurate, this book is recommended only if you are interested in learning more about this discredited perspective. Now that Namibia is a 7-year old stable democracy, the views represented here have entered the dustbin of history.

If you have gotten much pleasure reading the works of W.Somerset Maugham as I have, you should not waste your money trying to find a copy of this book, as I did. Simply put, Morgan's work is a very well researched, poorly written,extremely negative account of Maugham's life. The entire book consists primarily of personal and professional attacks of every type imaginable on Maugham. Absolutely the worst biography I've ever read.