I have only two criticisms. One is that there is no unified grammar-reference section; if you forget a detail, you need to find the chapter where that point of grammar was introduced. My second criticism is really just a quibble but on the CDs only two different voices are ever heard -- one man, one woman. It's not a big deal really, it's more comical than confusing, for example at the auto mechanic's shop it sounds like one guy is arguing with himself (over the "straszny" price of getting his rear axle repaired)! Surely, even on a low budget, Juszczak could have roped a few family and friends to do extra voices. Or maybe it's just a Polish thing, the way Polish TV's dubbed versions of foreign programs will use just one voice throughout.
So all in all, a good book. If, however, you already know Russian, a more appropriate book (if you can find it -- it's been out of print for ten years and I was lucky to find one in Armenia) is Uchebnik Pol'skogo Iazyka . It'll leverage what you already know and focus on the specific points where Polish is different from Russian, like cool little diagrams comparing the semantic ranges of cognate words. It's also a bigger book with far more vocabulary, and readings that take you all the way to real, unedited, Polish. But even so, it's worth buying Juszczak's book just to listen to the CDs.
