Total Page : 528
Publisher : Barron s Educational Series
Publication Date : 2007 10 12
>> Lots of mistakes
There are so many problems with this book I don t really know where to start The mistakes of facts buffoonish attempts at political correctness omissions of important facts opinions masquerading as facts vagaries grammatical errors manipulations of semantics and maudlin emotion which has no place in a history book that I can not list them all
By the way I am reviewing the 2009 3rd edition which I couldn t find listed on Amazon I guess it doesn t really matter since many of the jumbled facts in this 2009 edition are 10 years out of date
I actually trained as a language and literature teacher and have very little training in history I turned to the SAT and CLEP books because the few books geared toward the Praxis history test are crap I can only imagine how many more mistakes an actual historian would find in this book I began to see the value of literature teachers becoming literate in history after a book called So Far From the Bamboo Grove made its way onto required school reading lists
Again due to space and time limits I will only list some of the more egregious stupidisms in this test prep book
1 Further is temporal and farther is spacial Between two and among three or more
2 Huang Ho is not pinyin and it is not the Mandarin standard Putonghua dialect that would be Huang He At the beginning the authors make a note about the difference between the Wade Giles and the pretty much standard pinyin spellings but they continue to confuse the two Also Madame Mao s name is Jiang Qing not Jian Qing If you go looking for The Sinkiang on a modern map I doubt you will find it as most standard maps use the pinyin Xinjiang
3 The Cultural Revolution did not end in 1968 It began in 1966 and ended in 1976 The authors managed to get this correct in another part of the this book Furthermore it only ended because of Mao s death and it was not a genocide as the authors maintain neither was the Khmer Rouge mass murder
4 There is no index and thus no way to look up specific information This is after all a review book
5 It hasn t been called Zaire since 1997 For the last 12 years it has been called the Democratic Republic of Congo Again this is the 2009 edition Many of the statistics given in this book stop circa 2000
6 On page 406 it says In 1952 Fulgencio Batista assumed dictatorial control Immediately guerrillas led by communist trained Fidel Castro who was backed by the Soviet Union led a successful overthrow of Batisita and instituted a communist backed government in Cuba The latter actually did not happen until 1959 So much for immediately Communism has basically been dead since the 1990s but this book gives the impression that is its still a thriving threat
7 Facts omitted Several notable historical figures are absent The authors are fond of using native terminology for concepts but I noticed when it came to describing the Islamic conquests they shied away from using terms like dhimmi They also make it seem that Europeans were the first and only people to enslave black Africans failing to mention that Arabs started it a millennium before the Portuguese Moreover on page 433 in describing the Arabs present day enslavement of black people in Sudan the authors refer to the victims as rebellious African Christians This tends to give the impression that they somehow deserve to be raped enslaved or murdered
8 In spite of their political correctness the authors demonstrate a definite bias in favor of democracy They give the impression that any government that isn t democratic is inherently backwards and evil Democracy doesn t necessarily work for everyone I would give examples but they would be my personal biases and some countries do just fine being ruled by royal families The authors need to be more respecting and open minded
9 Picasso was not a surrealist page 426 He invented the Cubist movement
10 Gross oversimplifications and omissions of explanations The flooding in Bangladesh is listed under the heading of Genocide and the authors fail to mention anything about one of its major causes deforestation page 433 In mentioning Afghan refugees fleeing to Pakistan there is no mention of the fact that ironically Pakistan has also caused a lot of the problems in Afghanistan
11 I started becoming suspicious of a lot of the stats given in this book So I looked some of them up in multiple sources On page 430 the population of China is give as 1 6 billion The official number given by the Chinese is 1 3 Personally I suspect the actual number is much higher but suspicions don t have any place in a book of facts The authors also put India s population at 1 3 billion As of 2009 it was 1 17 billion
12 Lack of coherency At the very end two rambling paragraphs are devoted to genocide Only here is Turkey s genocide against Armenians mentioned It is referred to as a disposal and no explanation is given The last chapter is a redundant platitudinous potpourri like some presidential speech Out of all of the ills the 21st century is facing again this book seems to stop at 2000 the booming illegal sex trafficking industry is not even mentioned
13 As of 2007 there were 27 EU member countries On page 434 of this 2009 edition it is listed as 17
14 On page 393 it is claimed that Egypt was A protectorate since 1914 it gained independence in 1922 Egypt did not gain true independence from Britain until 1956 According to Encyclopedia Britannica it was dominated by the British from 1882 1956 and an occupied protectorate from 1882 1922
15 Arab/Israel conflict page 393 The authors mention that Jewish population in Palestine increased during the interwar period but fail to mention that the Arab population increased as well On page 394 mention of one million Arabs fleeing Palestine during war of 1948 but no mention of the 500 000 Jews expelled from Arab lands in response to the formation of the Jewish state
16 On page 428 is a list of famous protest literature Absent from this brief list are Dr Zhivago which was banned by the USSR and 1984 by George Orwell This might explain why so many people under 30 think that Big Brother is just a silly TV show
17 Ambiguously worded test question Incorrect answers This is only of many
Page 51 Question 18 Which of the following societies developed a lasting concept of monotheism
a Hebrew
b Egyptian
c Non Nok Tha
d Chinese
According to the authors the correct answer is the Egyptians It is a theory that an Egyptian pharaoh came up with a short lived version of monotheism hence it wasn t lasting Therefore I would credit the Hebrews with that It not only lasted but spawn two other major religions Moreover Abraham the first monotheist pre dates Akhenaten the monotheistic sun god worshipper So this brings me back to the Hebrews
18 Maudlin apologetics The authors point out that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were controversial and that some liken them to Hitler s genocide of the Jews This has to be the most non sensical analogy in the entire book I would like to challenge those who share the authors view to take a few moments to consider how there lives might have been different if Germany or Japan had invented the atomic bomb first they came pretty close
Absent from this ersatz text is any mention of Japan s Unit 731 the Rape of Nanjing Mitsubishi s the auto manufacturer brutal enslavement of American POWs or the Bataan Death March
19 Those evil European barbarians At every turn the authors let everyone know that X was invented by such and such centuries before the Europeans Using a bit of inductive reason I maintain that if the Americas had not been conquered by Europeans it would have been Arabs or Chinese They had the maritime technology before Europe The Arabs controlled the overland routes to Asia and thus had no reason to go searching for a northwest passage According to one theory the Chinese landed in North America in 1421 At any rate they were on their way to making in roads when suddenly there was a change of dynasty and the emperor took an isolationist attitude
>> This is all you need to get an 800
I have to disagree with the other poster The closest thing that I d had to an introduction to world history was an AP European History class my sophomore year As I realized that I had to take SAT IIs and I m more of the humanities type I decided to self study for World History This mind you was during November of my Senior year
Practically everything that I learned about African Asian Middle Eastern and Native American history came from this book After reading it intensely for two weeks I felt as though I had learned a ton Needless to say the European sections of the book were certainly equally as informative Come late December I found out that I had received an 800 on the test Thanks Barron s
Indeed the text is jam packed with details but unfortunately the World History SAT II is a very detail oriented test If you want an 800 on the test this is all you need
>> WAY too much and WAY too scattered
This book did not help me at all I read more or less skimmed the entire thing HUGE mistake I ended up reusing my AP World book to prepare for the SAT The ideas in here are way to concentrated on the details a lot more than even what other Barron s does and the information will never be tested on the SAT
So I decided at first this book might be a reference book for the future if I need to look up something really quick but as I read through I realized the thing is a piece of junk NO ORGANIZATION FALSE GENERALIZATIONS VERY POOR CHRONOLOGICAL ARRANGEMENT
To make things worse the tests in here are practically impossible and it s not just me I felt the actual thing is somewhere around 100 times easier and there were mistakes to at least 5 or 6 questions The explanations are short and useless and because the book is so poorly organized it is difficult to search the correct information in the text
If I could give one piece of advice to the authors here it is
Stop trying to show readers you can outcompete other review books on how much history you stuff here and stop trying to show readers how creative you can get putting the history together Give them what they want and that s a book with a good SAT II review
I am so disappointed with Barron s right around now I am switching review books to Princeton
