I picked up this book thinking that it would be like the Horrible Histories series, but for American history instead. It's not. It's worse. It's disjointed. I felt that the writing style was really choppy. There is a foreword where the author says that he was a former textbook author and there were all these stories that he had to leave out. Well, I felt like he took those stories, put them in chronological order, and BAM! We have this book. I stopped reading shortly after Sheinkin starts discussing the American Revolution, because there was a section where he said something along the lines of, "Our country's history isn't a fairy tale, every body makes mistakes, not every gets a happy ending, but hey, at least it's interesting, right?" This comes after he discusses Abigail Adams' attempt to get her husband to "remember the ladies" and the British commenting that "those who yelp loudest for liberty" and equality of man own slaves themselves. To me, he seemed to implying that, hey our country has this awful background, but at least it makes it interesting! Or is he implying that perhaps our country would have a boring history if we didn't have racist and sexist undertones? Maybe I am overreacting, but it definitely was the last straw for a book I was already frustrated with.