Save your money on this dog of a test guide and instead, check out the Magill Masterpieces of World Literature, ed. by Frank Magill. Well written, concise, pertinent, and more timely for what the test covers. Good luck.

As part of my preparation for taking the GRE Literature Subject Test, I bought this book, in addition to McMullen's "Cracking the GRE Literature" and the official ETS study guide. My advice: save your money and buy the latter two books, the "Best Test Prep" is nothing of the sort, providing no strategies for reviewing for the Test. Instead, the reader gets six exams that inaccurately reflect the questions most likely to appear on the test. Read the McMullen book or the ETS book for a better reflection of what the actual test will look like. The reading list, for all its prodigious length (seven pages) actually seems inadequate for reviewing for the test.

I did, however, find the explanations for each question in the book useful and if nothing else, the book provides a wealth of questions and answers on English, American, and World Literature to supplement your study elsewhere. Borrow it from a friend rather than buying it.

The best test preparation gives you some guidance in how to prepare. Simply having a sample test and a list of all the works of literature that you could be tested is not helpful. Although these tests were not created by ETS (the makers of the GRE), REA did base the tests on past subject tests. This also gives you some guidance on what, and when, to study.

This book contains three samples tests and some drills. For the tests, the answers are explained so you know which answer is right as well as why the other answers are wrong. This is a big plus in studying. The drill questions are designed to see if you are learning the information from the study pages in the front.

The study pages are helpful. They discuss the main ideas and writers for the different periods of literature. As most books, they recommend going to the work itself, but if you do not have time, this information is helpful. With the writer, you get what the person was famous for, and if that work was very influential, what the main ideas of it were. It also discusses the major theories of literary criticism.

With the study pages and the tests is the timeline. I think this is the under-rated part of the book. It is designed for eight weeks of study, but it mentions that it could be condensed to two weeks. Although it is rather general, it still provides you with a guide to help calm you through the stress of studying.

I would recommend getting this book to help practice and prepare for the GRE Subject Test in Literature.

there is no outline and there are no answers to the multiple choice questions

I ordered this book, and thought I would not have to read the text, but I was unprepared for the class. I also did not need the busy-work portions of the book.

The Guidebook is not a substitute for the text, but it is not designed to be. It is a good resource for those looking for review materials to help them in a course in which American Pageant is the primary text.

The author fails to see things with the eyes of the generation about which he is writing. That makes for bad history, merely the out-of-context attachment of situations, strung together into a book. How disappointing. However, he cannot be very lonesome. I'm afraid he has the company of a lot of clever, educated, useless historians (so-called) these days.

Having purchased this volume from a bookseller's table, with its gorgeous portrait of the aging Thomas Jefferson, I began to read it. After a chapter or two, I sought the review at Amazon.com. That reviewer was not overjoyed, nor was I. Roger Kennedy has assembled a collage of words, weaving together some history and some ideas about agriculture. The result is a success at neither. In the Bibliographic Notes (readable and comprehensible) he faults Henry Adams for describing Jefferson with faint praise, which Adams then turned against the 3rd President. Roger Kennedy does much the same.
If Kennedy's cause intrigues you, purchase the volume from Amazon.com at a good discount! The forewarned buyer will be less disappointed with a generous discount. Some errors of fact are thrown together with obvious errors of interpretation, the dust jacket is nicely done.
The thesis of Mr. Jefferson's Lost Cause is hardly realized. At its minimum, Kennedy suggests that Jefferson was a member of the planter class and promoted the planters' interests, while writing enthusiastically about America's yoeman farmers. While a marxist might joyfully propose a comparison between the planter class and modern agribusiness, that hope will be dashed by the author's denunciation of the southern farmer for failing to raise adequate capital by the development of larger banks.

Thomas Jefferson wrote eloquently against slavery and in favor of a nation of small farmers. He also ran a large plantation worked by several hundred slaves. Traditionally, Americans have emphasized the former, and found excuses for the latter. Kennedy does exactly the opposite. In fact, he argues that Jefferson was in a real sense responsible for preserving and extending slavery--and the system of large estates owned by "planters" that went with it.

During the Revolutionary War, a number of Virginians felt that slavery would eventually have to be ended. Jefferson did not support them, and slavery became more firmly established. In 1784, the government set up by the Articles of Confederation began to decide what to do with the new territories outside the 13 original states. A number of people felt that slavery should not be allowed there. Jefferson did not support them, and slavery was extended. In 1802, Jefferson, now president, bought the giant Louisiana Territory from France. A number of Americans felt that slavery should not be allowed there. Jefferson did not support them, and slavery was further extended.

Why would Jefferson do this, especially since slavery made impossible a country of small farmers? Kennedy has several answers. First, Jefferson wasn't really that fond of small farmers. He considered many of them to be uncivilized bumpkins. But he positively hated industrialization, and felt especially bad about free black "mechanics." He thought that the only proper way to treat freed slaves was the bring them back to Africa (or maybe Haiti). Until that would happen, it was "not yet" time for emancipation. Jefferson was a planter himself and felt that other planters were his peers. He wanted them to like him, and he relied on them politically. Kennedy also seems to say that Jefferson was an unwitting stooge of British merchants. They wanted to lend the planters money, buy their cotton, and sell them English manufactured goods. Had the South developed like the North, with towns and workshops constantly springing up amidst the family farms, this "neo-colonialism" (or "colonial-imperialism") couldn't have happened.

Kennedy thinks slavery was especially environmentally destructive. Compared to owner-worked small farms, slave-worked plantations killed the soil. This is a difficult argument to make. No landowner deliberately exhausts his land in ten years if he can keep it productive for 20 or 30 or more. There was new land in the west that one could move to, but you didn't have to be a plantation-owner to sell and move (and if your land is ruined, why will anyone pay you much money for it?). However, says Kennedy, more small-holders were too poor to move, and out of necessity, they took better care of their land. Besides, caring for the land required initiative and local knowledge or complex procedures or special tools. Slave-owners would not permit their slaves to do much besides follow simple orders and use simple tools.

And Kennedy is heart-broken at what could have been. Maybe free soil outside the old slave south, maybe freed slaves as yeoman, maybe decent treatment of the Indians, maybe well-cared for land. The second half of the book might be summarized: merchants sell individual Indians money on credit, then with the US Army at their back, force Indian nations to give up vast tracts of land to discharge the debt. Slave-owners move in and ruin the land. Americans settle beyond the boundaries of the United States. Then when the local Indians, escaped slaves, "maroons" (mixed Indian and African), and European colonial governments resist, get the US armed forces to enforce their stealing. Slave-owners move in and ruin the land. I was unclear exactly how this related to Jefferson. Kennedy seems to be saying, "He knew about a lot about it; he was happy about it; sometimes he took positive action to bring it about; even when he was no longer president, he did nothing to stop it."

I liked the way this book takes on hypocrisy, pretension, and myth, e.g., the myth of the "independence" of southern plantations. Planters borrowed money every year, and every year had to sell their crop on the world market. Prices and interests rates were never the same from one year to the next, and planters see-sawed between boom and bust. Yet Kennedy then buys into an equally ridiculous myth: that English merchants just decided on their own what prices and interst rates would be. He can't seem to comprehend that in these markets, everyone had "exposure" and no one was "in control." A major flaw of the book is the idea that after the Revolution the South became part of "an invisible empire manipulated from London and the [English] Midlands."

I feel like I should have liked this book but I didn't. Why? The book has some beautiful phrases and sentences but too often they were like raisins in a poorly cooked pudding. Sometimes it's hard to tease out exactly what Kennedy is saying and sometimes he just sounds silly. Along with the raisins are some awful jellied currants (a failed metaphor? now you know how this reader felt).

Kennedy has been head of the Smithsonian's American history museum and of the National Park Service. This book left me with the impression that Kennedy feels, "Once I had to uphold the icons. But now I may indulge myself. In an oh-so-civilized way, I will skewer those who are unjustly worshipped and elevate those unjustly scorned." All too often it sounded bureaucratic and snide.

The book just doesn't flow well. It was exceedingly difficult to keep all the people and places straight. And THIS was maddening: three quarters of the way through the book I turned the page and found 8 glossy pages of prints and rudimentary maps. They would have been some help. Yet nowhere, NOWHERE in the book are these pages mentioned, not when the people shown are introduced, not when places are mentioned, not in the table of contents, not anywhere.

Toward the end I began to feel like I was reading some of the anti-Clinton investigative journalism that blossomed at the end of his presidency. I was glad someone had the energy and the commitment to do it but I was overwhelmed by the minutiae. And I knew that I was getting a one-sided picture.

I give it four stars for content, two for presentation.