GRE - ALL the Quant and Verbal New Manhattan Books Reviewed

Hello everyone,

I’m here to share my strong endorsement of the newly released book from Manhattan GRE Prep. I had been eagerly awaiting their launch, and they absolutely confirmed my expectations. These books undoubtedly set the benchmark for GRE preparation, just as their predecessors did for the previous version of the GRE. It’s a must-have for anyone serious about achieving success on the test.


Background Story.....and other amenities!!


All that said, I am an old guy. Someone said to me I am a testimony of the ancients: bygone age are the days when I ordered the Manhattan GMAT series books 4th edition 2009 and shortly after were released the Manhattan GRE series books 2nd edition in 2011 as well. At these links, you can see how old they are. I took the GMAT books for my exam and the GRE, because I was curious about these exams, which were, at the time, niche exams for very few people. The feeling was overwhelming: you had the tool to literally invalidate the GMAT. To crash it. The books were a new frontier: how they were structured, the notions contained in them........everything was on point. It was almost a pleasure to study and practice.

However, what is the morale of this excursus: both the exams have not changed that much since then. In this new GRE guide, we still have practice problems in the problem set section (I'll show you in the cons) that we had at the time. Nonetheless, this book is a perfect fit - I do not think of another book on the market that is so comprehensive yet agile - for your GRE as a whole. Specifically, a great score is almost guaranteed.


In the book, we have

• Six (6) grand units;
• 32 chapters + GRE Math Glossary:
• The math contents range from PEMDAS to the coordinate plane, passing through probability and counting methods.

Positive sides of the book

• The organization has been vastly improved from the previous GRE Math Strategies book. Not only does this make much more sense, but it is also more efficient and useful for the students themselves. The previous books followed a sort of classic template: under certain unit of the book, you inevitably found the relative notions. For example, the fractions were along with decimals and percentages. However, now for example, they are channeling in a unit in which the last chapter is Data Interpretation. This makes somewhat more sense: in DI on the GRE problems, these notions are required in every kind of problem.
  
• Usually what we do have from a book is at the very most: how to use the book, which is quite helpful. It is a sort of orientation for the students to exploit at their best all the notions in the book itself, without being just a book but something dynamic. ok. Here, instead, we have the first chapter conceived to develop your number sense. It sounds like an abstract concept, but it is crucial to perform at your best during the exam. It was also present in the previous version of the current book, but here it is well developed and robust.
  
• Last chapter is about advanced topics such as benchmarking and sequences. What makes me perplexed is how a decimal terminates or interest simple and compound, is an advanced topic for such an exam.
  
• Every single chapter and sub-chapter is coupled with a problem set to train what you have learned in the same chapter immediately. This is something that in the DNA of Manhattan. They are not simple drill sets but a mix of full problems also.
  
• The book is not as expensive as other resources, having everything - literally - you need for the GRE test

Negative sides of the book

Here we come what I said in my premise of my review.

• You can easily study with the old version of this book when Manhattan released a set of books to tackle every single area of the GRE at its best. Notice for example, a comparison from these two screenshots. we do have side by side an old problem that is still carried in the new book. And an old problem-solving question mutated into a QCQ question. This of course, is not negative. However, I would prefer the old problem sets because they were way more robust to reinforce the concepts just learned
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• In the book sets, there was a specific and entire book dedicated to how to tackle QCQ questions which are one of the hierarchies of the GRE. Essentially, the book was inserted as a chapter in the previous version of the book. Nonetheless, here we do not have at all. I believe it is a huge setback.

Final Thoughts

Do we suggest the book for self-study, invest 40 bucks, and nothing else to nail the GRE?

The answer is definitely YES. It is a bargain for what's inside. However, if you find old books in a set on eBay (second-hand) or another website, I would give some thought to buying them. Believe me: it would be worth every single penny.