Sparknotes J.R.R. Tolkien: His Life and Works (Library of Great Authors)

Rating:
Summary: Really Weak
Review: By attempting to cut straight to the meaning of the book, you're shortchanging yourself and your own understanding of the meaning. This book oversimplifies Tolkien to the point of inaccuracy. Please, do yourself a favor and just read the true Lord of the Rings.

Rating:
Summary: Plot summaries of Tolkien
Review: This volume is from a Barnes & Noble house series in the style of Cliffs Notes. It consists mostly of detailed plot summaries, chapter by chapter, of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, together with weirdly detached and gratingly pompous summaries of each chapter's significance. "He [Frodo] refuses to kill Gollum party because killing would pain him" (p. 132). Pain whom, Frodo or Gollum? Lists of principal characters are just useless. But the book's greatest flaw is its attempt to link Tolkien to the primary world, in statements like "Tolkien's Council of Elrond is fashioned after the United Nations" (p. 92), or an unintentionally hilarious attempt to prove Tolkien unwordly by listing world events of the 1910s (why just that decade?) which he isn't known to have mentioned in letters (p. 7). Fortunately World War I isn't among them.