Hey, you've found me! Never use your real name and location in an online forums! Nah, I'm just kidding. Hopefully, you'll enjoy the book and learn something from it.
I've always been embarrassed by those Amazon reviews, and find it odd that several of the positive reviews are essentially 'false positives' in the sense that they are thanking Amazon for a quick delivery but don't say anything about the book itself. So, sadly enough, the Amazon "score" could be worse!
My 'ego protection' theory is that the only people who post Amazon reviews are those who have decided to blame the book for their poor performance in the course. We're talking about a sample of 25 people in the past 6 years; the book has sold tens of thousands of copies during that period.
In fact, our text has been (by far) the #1 selling book in the market for "Survey of Accounting" courses for 20 years strong. Until recently years, we have never even had a single clear cut competitor that had more than a 20% market share, although collectively we don't typically control much more than half the market.
The book certainly takes an atypical (user-oriented as opposed to preparer-oriented) approach; it is designed specifically for the non-accounting student who wishes to gain an overall understanding of financial reporting and managerial decision making using accounting data, but who will not him/herself become an accountant or prepare accounting statements.
For a number of reasons, many 'traditional' accounting educators have a difficult time breaking away from the tendency (dare I say "need") to teach mechanical bookkeeping details (i.e., using debits and credits and taking a transactional approach), which is precisely what our text is designed to deemphasize (and thus does not fully support in terms of the end of chapter materials and the like).
Without going into far too much detail, those types of instructors (as well as their students) will quickly experience a sense of frustration, much as you would in trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. When the central focus is shifted to the resulting financial statements themselves, and the impact of transactions on those statements, the approach that we've taken becomes much easier to elucidate. <--- There I go with my big words and convoluted writing style!
In any case, the book is alive and well. I'm now working on the initial writing/rewriting phases for the upcoming 9th edition.
Here's the link to our website:
http://highered.mcgraw-hill.com/site..._center_view0/