Fifteen courses in one volume: a capstone that reads the world as a whole, and fourteen regional courses that profile 193 states — 190 members of the UN, Palestine, Taiwan, and Kosovo. Each region is organized around a single question — which way the oil flows, how to live beside China, who holds the strait — and every country profile opens with a dated table of its facts: the leader, the system, the Freedom House rating, the people, the land, and the minimum wage. Each course opens with a Who's Who that defines its parties, armed groups, and institutions, and closes with its leaders ranked by time in office, its key points, and a quiz. Each regional course opens its first module with a map of the region and each country module with a map of its countries, and the capstone maps the fourteen regions. The capstone sets side by side the twenty-eight states that carry the story, from the G20 to Taiwan, Ukraine, Iran, and Nigeria. Read it cover to cover, or go to any part by the pages below.
The regions follow those questions instead of continental lines, and most of the questions turn on a sea or a strait. Where a sea joins countries on different continents, they share a course: the Mediterranean course puts France and Italy beside Turkey, Israel, Syria, and Egypt; Sudan's war is covered with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states across the Red Sea; and Russia and Iran, both Caspian powers, are read together. A continent holds too many countries to share one question: Asia would put Japan in the same course as Yemen.