Christine N. makes a good point here, namely that Cengage has many departments and imprints. The Contemporary Authors department is separate from the others, which include a number of imprints that represent once independent publishers that Cengage bought out over the years. Some of these imprints (like Lucent Books, originally in San Diego), each of which has its own staff of editors, are better and more reliable than others. Uncle Jim is right to say that some of the books put out by these imprints have factual errors in them. But often the quality of these books depends on both the particular editors in question and the particular authors they sign on to work with them. Occasionally they hire reliable historians like myself, in which case those books can be counted on to be factually reliable. Still, there is plenty of variation in Cengage's overall output. A few times they hired me to rewrite and correct other authors' manuscripts and in each case I was horrified at the errors and sloppy writing. It's books like those that are likely some of the ones that Uncle Jim has seen over the years.
