GRE Verbal Grail

I purchased this book after reading two reviews and 5-star rating, but I was totally disappointed after going thru it. 1000 word lists and the strategies elucidated for verbal section are almost same as any other book. There is nothing new or special that you will not find in any other PREP book.The major issue with this book is in TC and SE sections. If you go thru official ETS books, you will rarely find any one line or half line question from TC and SE sections. But this book has 70-80% one-liner questions. Also, most of the questions don't need logic to decipher; they are very straightforward if you know the meaning of all those difficult words.I returned this book within a week and Amazon refunded the amount. I would not recommend this book.

It has many good practice questions. I give four stars because the explanations for the answers are not really helping me understand my mistakes.

Seems to be a great book.

I have been using this book for a couple of weeks now and here are my thoughts on it.For Text Completion and Sentence Equivalence, the book is adequate, though nothing out of the ordinary. It covers all the strategies and contains enough practice questions (100 of each) to apply the same on. While the one blank questions are mostly easy, I found some of the three blank ones rather difficult.It is Reading Comprehension, however, where this book really shines and trumps any other GRE verbal book out there (I have gone through at least 4 other books before getting this one). It gives detailed strategies and approach for different question types and I found the suggestions in the book extremely practical and applicable on actual passages. The separate coverage of Reasoning questions goes on to make the book even more comprehensive. The practice passages are also of a good difficulty level and make for an excellent practice set.The vocab list is short and precise, like the rest of the book. However, if it’s vocab you are after, I would recommend the other Aristotle book – the 45 day GRE vocab – as I am finding the exercises in that book very useful in remembering words and their usage.To sum up, if you are looking to buy the one comprehensive book for all aspects of GRE Verbal, this is the one I would recommend.

This book was very useful in helping me prepare for GRE verbal but like all good things, you have to put in those hours to study and get the most out of the book. I was really struggling to improve on Verbal and this book was really a great help in preparing me for my target scoreI found the reading comprehension section of the book to be the most exhaustive out of all three sections in the book. The RC section was very detailed and contained RC reading strategies and detailed approaches to doing different types of questions such as Boldface, Strengthen, Weaken etc that I could never earlier tackle confidently.Apart from that, there were a lot of practice RC questions and by the time I finished those, I knew that I ready to move to taking full length practice tests.Will recommend the book to anyone who is serious about scoring well on the GRE verbal section.

I bought this book after reading its excellent reviews online and I am glad I did because it has made a huge difference to my performance in the verbal section of the GRE. The book is very crisply written, the strategies are very usable and practical and the question banks are very comprehensive. A special mention needs to be made of the RC section of this book which is phenomenal by any standards. The word list was another good feature of this book not because it is long but rather because it is short. Completing these 1000 words gives you an excellent base to start with and build on later. Highly recommended!

This is an excellent book. I have used quite a few other books for my prep and I think that this book is the most comprehensive and resourceful.. Here's my analysis of the strengthens and weaknesses of the book.Strengthens- The RC section of the book is simply unbeatable. It's really detailed; the overall strategies for tackling RC are great and the techniques for tackling each RC question type are really helpful.- The book has a massive number of practice questions. It gave me ample arsenal to practice for 1 month. It contains a total of 300 practice questions-100 questions each of sentence equivalence, text completion and reading comprehension.- This is the only book that solely focuses on the verbal section of GRE. The problem I found with other books is that they have a one-in-all approach i.e. one book contains Math, Verbal, AWA and that's why there's hardly any in-depth focus on one area. This is the only book that picks up one area and helps you master it quite well.Weaknesses- I noticed a couple of typos in the book- I found some of the questions in text completion and sentence completion to be fairly easy to tackle.Who this book is for ?- If you have at least 2 weeks left for the GRE.- You're targeting 160+ on verbal and you've hit a wall inspite of using the other books like Kaplan and Princeton which address various topics superficially.Who this book is NOT for ?-If you have less than 2 weeks, probably buying this book at the last minute won't be of much help as it's really detailed and using this in a haste wont be of much help- It's not for those who just want a good enough score on Verbal(sub 160). I'd recommend using Kaplan and Princeton in that caseOverall, I will highly recommend this book if verbal section is your pain area on GRE.It'd probably be the best $24 you'd have spent on your GRE prep.