Governments Around the World: From Democracies to Theocracies. Edited by Fred M. Shelley. Santa Barbara, CA ABC-CLIO, 2015. 522 pages. acid free $100 (ISBN 98-1-4408-3812). Ebook available (978-1-4408-3813-2).

The brief single-volume Governments Around the World: From Democracies to Theocracies is edited by Fred M. Shelley, Professor and Chair of the Department of Geography at the University of Oklahoma. The task of meaningfully representing international governments in a volume of more than five hundred pages is a difficult one, but Shelley delivers an excellent work that uses illustrative examples of countries to guide the reader to an understanding of types of governments without exhaustively providing all examples. Shelley has authored several other related reference works including The World’s Population: An Encyclopedia of Critical Issues, Crises, and Ever-Growing Countries (ABC-CLIO, 2014) and Nation Shapes: the Stories Behind the World’s Borders (ABC-CLIO, 2013).

Each chapter of the volume is dedicated to a type of government such as Democracies and Republics, Communist States, and Theocracies. There is a brief introduction to each chapter that provides an overview of the form of government and types of government within the forms. Each two- to three-page introduction includes a few key references and the content serves as a fine primer to better understand the countries contained within the sections. The specific country sections, which at fiften to twenty pages per country, compose most of the work, provide both breadth and depth about the countries, including sections on contemporary issues, economic and social data such as education rates, information on political parties, excerpts of key political documents such as Constitutions, maps, and other social and political information. In addition to the twenty-five country profiles, there is a chapter on Transnational Organizations, which covers six major organizations such as The African Union and The Arab League. The Transnational Organization section is a particular strong point of the volume, and all organizations are covered in the same comprehensive and detailed manner as the countries. There is also an appendix consisting of a collection of five brief five-page viewpoints that are cases written by a variety of scholars that analyze potential future developments for Cuba, North Korea, Puerto Rico, free trade agreements and the Eurozone crisis. This appendix is a good conclusion to the volume, in that these are brief case studies illustrating concepts, forms of government and transnational organizations, and political and social changes that lead to governmental change.

This affordable work is an important update to reference works on comparative politics, and fills a gap in reference works analyzing types of government. The two-volume Oxford Companion to Comparative Politics (2012), Oxford Handbook of Political Institutions (2006), and the Sage Handbook of Comparative Politics (2009) are all excellent academic reference works, but all look broadly at comparative politics or types of institutions and do not have the focus on types of government as Governments Around the World. For country information, the CIA Factbook (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook) provides some similar information, but does not provide the context related to the type of government or level of analysis as Governments Around the World. Shelley has crafted an accessible volume with clear and succinct writing with content that is more in-depth than free online resources, but is easier for college underclassmen or high school students to comprehend than other reference works by academic publishers. Highly Recommended for High Schools and Lower-Level Undergraduates.—Shannon Pritting, Library Director, SUNY Polytechnic Institute, Utica, New York