This is a review of Dr. Preston Jones'
Western Civilization II REA CLEP.
I found this volume to be a superb, succinct and clear study guide. This book provides a 'targeted' review, by which they mean that they cover the main facts one needs to know to do well on the CLEP test, but certainly a semester course on Western Civ. would provide the student with a wider and richer experience.
So much of Western Civ. can be learned through the eyes: from the Palace at Versailles to the Treaty of Maastricht. The web is a wonderful resource, and there are some expensive but beautiful Western Civ. books. Hopefully, I will review some of them shortly. Thus, if you want to know the topics covered in Western Civ. II and have six months, I encourage you to go beyond this or any other study guide.
Yet, even if you know Western Civ. pretty well you can benefit from a serious period of concentrated study in the month prior to the test. It is at this point that this guide can prove invaluable to you.
It not only covers the main facts of Western Civ. from the reign of Louis XIV onward, but Dr. Jones manages to convey the main currents of western intellectual thought. It is a difficult balance to provide information about the intellectual dialogue which occurs as events take their position in history, while managing to provide enough detail about the what, who, when, how and why of the actual events in just a few pages.
In the long run, I hope you are not just taking this test to get needed credits; but to receive credit for having a mature understanding of how Western Civ. shaped the world we live in. For that latter purpose, it is just as important to know how events are connected from an intellectual standpoint, as it is to remember that the Berlin Conference divided Africa among the European powers.
I wish that Western Civ. were systematically covered in high school. So many undergraduate students arrive at college with little knowledge of how the intellectual currents so popular today cannot be understood outside of their proper historical context.
If you are considering taking this CLEP test but are undecided, I encourage you to take this test because its content is likely to benefit your academic career and may enrich your life well beyond the college years. Other CLEP topics are important -- from marketing to chemistry-- but Western Civ. is the sort of knowledge that can help you make sense of the world you live in. Of course, learning Western Civ. II will take some serious work -- this guide can be useful, but it is not a walk in the park.
If you are a homeschooled high school student, you may benefit from this text as well; although you should supplement by a more traditional text or by ample use of the web.
The REA book instructs the student to pay attention to all terms in bold, but I find that there are too many to keep track. The serious student would have to either know most of them already, or list these historical terms on a separate notebook and then study from it.
As a suggestion, REA may want to create study cards with these terms and their definitions or descriptions. Or you can create your own cards. If you have a study partner, you can then play a game of twenty questions with the
Brezhnev Doctrine and
Novum Organum (both of which you should know!).
This book comes in two formats: a) with Testware that includes two automatically scoring tests and b) without. I will review the Testware later.
The book also has two full tests with complete answers.
I give it an
A.
to contain a succinct 146 page review of American history. This is not all you need to know about American history, but it is certainly a nice and well written review to remind you of what you already know, plus give you some new facts and information.
