Customer Reviews

Don't Know Much About Literature: What You Need to Know but Never Learned About Great Books and Authors

5 star:		(1)
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2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I guess I thought this book was going to offer a brief review of the classics and thier authors and why they were important to literature; instead it is filled with quizzes about the the books and authors that Mr. Davis assumes that we've already read! If you looked at the front cover of this book It claims "what you need to know but never learned about great books and authors" yet what it contains is a paragraph about a book or author and some true or false questions. Totally not what I expected. I would not recommend this book to anyone unless they were trying out for Jeopardy.

sub title should be: and you still won't after reading this book, either. It looks like it is a book for literature majors who want to play trivia with each other.

Better read David Denby's Great Books. good overview of various works with commentary and a reading guide

While I typically devour books about books and I have enjoyed Davis's other books, the "quiz" format of DKMA Literature just didn't work. It was literally too trivial and didn't offer any quality information on literary topics or authors. I browsed a few topics that caught my interest, but the configuration made any content meaningless.

Sorry, but I expected a book with more insight about famous writers and not trivia fact sheets with quizzes. Disappointing as the author has written some good books.

"Don't Know Much About Literature" is underwhelming. I expected a book more along the line of "America's Hidden History" (which is great). One page, large type print(reminds me of those books from grade school) fact sheets about the authors followed by some quiz questions is not an engaging book for me. The fact sheets are interesting but are real light. This is not a book for reading at the beach or relaxing on vacation.

I bought this book from Amazon and returned it within hours. A disgraceful lack of information - a paragraph ONLY on each literary figure covered and then a quiz. Most of this could be gleaned from a child's encyclopedia, never mind wikipedia. I bought it because I had enjoyed the "History" issue but this is a thin, paltry volume and I feel I know less about literature than before.

I like to read, but I'll never get to read everything that I want or should read (according to my old teachers) This is a way to get a brief overview of the author and some of their best writings so you too can be informed and speak about them at your next wine and brie party.

It seems like this book was put together over a weekend. Most of the "Don't Know Much About" books by Davis are well researched, well written, and obvious effort was put forth to pack so much information into a single book on the given topic. I've greatly enjoyed many of them, but this was a simple and quick way to make money off of the "Don't know much" series popularity, without having to put in any real work. I'm very disappointed that Davis decided to put his integrity on the shelf for a quick publication.