What You Should Know About Politics . . . But Don't, Fifth Edition: A Nonpartisan Guide to the Issues That Matter

Ms. Conrad has done an excellent job covering critical political topics from the start of our country until 2016. I am impressed at how neutral she remains when describing the actions taken by presidential administrations and Congress throughout the decades. She labels herself as a left-leaning libertarian. I sense that she does lean left, but she keeps her politics in check as she educates the reader objectively. Jessamyn Conrad is politically astute and knowledgeable. After thinking I knew most of what there was to know about politics, I learned a lot more.I am a political author. Like Ms. Conrad, I want to educate the American electorate on key political topics. Unlike Jessamyn, I am an engineer. I covered many of these same topics in my latest book, Engineering Unity: A Path to Resolving Political Polarization in the United States. My book views these topics from an engineer's perspective by quantifying statistics and differentiating the views of the left, right, and center. Reading Ms. Conrad’s view from a historian’s perspective was helpful.I hoped for more recent political insight from the most recent Trump and Biden administrations. It seems like most political observations in this book stopped around 2016.

I liked the way the book was presented. I did find an error in chapter on energy calling President Truman a Republican President when he was a Democrat.Contrary to what a previous review stated, this author is a woman.January 6th is a black mark on current American history. Also, there have always been issues with voting with machines, workers, etc. a system that continues to be reviewed and hopefully improved. Just because a candidate of a person’s choosing did not win the election, does not immediately mean there was voter fraud.I would recommend this book, it is a overview but not a comprehensive read by any means which is fine.

I like this book to give me excellent background knowledge on issues without political partisanship. Easy to read

Book came in with a couple of pages bent and 2 torn.

A concise, historical, comprehensive, fair, and balanced overview of the major political issues of the day. I recommend this as a one volume rundown of where we are and how we got here.Even though the 5th edition is copyrighted 2024, some of the content is already dated. This is mostly due to the rapidly changing events happening now worldwide. I was hoping that the author would have a blog to provide an update of issues and build on the material in the book.This book is text heavy and would benefit from including infographics for increased comprehension, especially for those of us who are more visual learners. I feel doing so will increase it's audience.

I read an older version of this book at the beach (it was on the shelf at the VRBO). When I saw that it was updated for the 2024 election I got excited. It is well written and very balanced. Unfortunately, it was not anywhere near up to date for what's going on today.

The minute the author called the mini riot on 1/6/2021 an "insurrection" he proves he is partisan and merely following leftist talking points.An "insurrection"? Major eye roll!Guns at a supposed insurrection? Nope!Organized plan to overthrow the government? Nope!Plan to actually fight with the military? Nope!Merely a protest with some out of control rioters mixed in to the crowd.What were 100,000 mostly peaceful protesters protesting? The NUMEROUS legal issues with the November 2020 election. They wanted the certification process to be slowed/paused so that the "irregularities" could be investigated before the left/Dems stole the election via their many lawbreaking methods.Examples: AZ, PA, GA and Wisconsin have all been proved to have Broken election laws and used illegal methods in the Nov 2020 election. Without counting those proven illegally collected/accepted votes would the left have won in 2020?

It should have been titled What You Should Know About the Politics of 2012.