I enjoyed reading the Hakim book. The author did a nice job making you, the reader, feel as if she was talking to you directly, teaching you history. I enjoyed the brief chapters. As we all are probably aware, some textbooks drag out long, boring chapters. She did a nice job summarizing the wealth of information. It's easy to use as well. If you're ever wondering about a specific topic during this time period, you can easily look up the chapter and get a basic idea of the topic you are searching for. However, I feel that this may be a downfall to the book. Key word: basic. I would not want to soley rely on this book as a textbook for my class. It just skims the surface of American history. I need the "whole" idea to completely understand history. This book seems as if it pulls the big ideas from history and threw it in a book. It kind of confused me at times.
Two pieces of information from the book that I learned...
1) Long ago someone could get arrested and thrown into jail and nobody would tell him what he had done wrong. Sometimes they even forgot about a person in jail. They died before they would even know what he did wrong. I find that very interesting.
2)Yankee Doodle...we all know that song! The British made that song up to insult Americans. Who knew?
That's what I mean about this book....It gives you cool, little facts about history that typically get lost in the teaching of American history. Good book to keep for the future!
