It's tough to keep students afloat in a sea of detail when moving from country to country in a comparative course. While it's important to give students a sense of place, lengthy textbooks can overwhelm them with far too much description. Students are left with no clear path for understanding regional context or for making meaningful cross-national comparisons, and little sense of larger concepts and themes. "The Politics of Governing: A Comparative Introduction" answers this dilemma in a truly brief text - only 320 pages long - that frames country case studies within regional chapters. This...