Enjoyable but not completely satisfying

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	• The Intellectual Devotional: Revive Your Mind, Complete Your Education, and Roam Confidently with the ... David S. Kidder, Noah D. Oppenheim Rodale Books, 2006 - 375 pages average customer review:based on 132 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Great Concept

Certainly a great concept and practical. I think reading a whole book can be dounting and we arrely digest that much information. I write books as well with short passages for daily use and I belive this helps the reader to live the book each day.

**Beware of intellectualizing class="textlinks">your way through life without actually experiencing the MOMENT. LIVE NOW! Knowledge without experience is useless...

If you like this book be sure to try my book, Your Daily Walk with the Great Minds" as well as my new book coming soon, "Eastern Wisdom for Your Soul."

Make today count...

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A bit of knowledge in many subjects

This book gives the reader a glimpse into 364 different nuggets of knowledge. If we want to learn more in depth then it is up to you to pursue it further in other books.
The grouping by subject to day of the week really didn't matter to me. In some ways I would rather have read a more theme based set than jumping back and forth between subject types. For instance, the stories of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle are on pages 13, 20, and 41, respectively, giving just enough days between them that you wonder if you may have forgotten a bit of relevant information and re-read the previous piece just to be sure. However, this re-reading does help reinforce the information you learned.
Overall the idea to expose class="textlinks">yourself to things you may not know about (and may not care) is done well enough to keep it interesting. I think you will enjoy it as much as I do.

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Enjoyable but not completely satisfying

The Intellectual Devotional is just that: A great nightstand book, an interesting occasional light read. It may be useful for filling in some small educational gaps, and it is certainly entertaining. The book is also beautifully laid out and attractively packaged.

I did find, however, that nearly every entry left me with more questions than answers. On the one hand, this is a good thing. An intellectual devotional ought to leave you wanting to know more about a particular subject, ought to perhaps whet class="textlinks">your appetite for further study. On the other hand, the questions that I had were often so basic: Can you give me a general time frame for when Hammurabi wrote his code?

Each subject gets a one-page treatment--obviously, these are extremely brief blurbs. That being the case, and these being necessarily considered the few hundred most crucial "got to know" topics, is there really no more that the authors can think of to write about a topic than the number of hits a Google search on the topic pulls up? Curious.

So I'm giving The Intellectual Devotional a mixed review. I enjoyed it. I think I learned a thing or two. Yet I walked away feeling that (a) I could've learned so much more, even from such a small book covering such an admittedly enormous amount of information, and (b) ultimately the authors haven't fulfilled the promise of the book's subtitle (Revive Your Mind, Complete Your Education, and Roam Confidently with the Cultured Class) even if they have written a compelling intellectual devotional. To be honest, I think that a top-notch book editor, reading The Intellectual Devotional more critically, could do wonders with a second edition, adding the few important factoids that scream out for clarification (Hammurabi's dates, for example) and culling extraneous information (the Google search hits) to make room for juicier nuggets.

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Fantastic!!!

This book is excellent. It is an interesting read and a great coffee table book. I have mine out on my desk at work and share with others. It has many conversation starters.

What a fun book!

I love reading and learning about something new everyday. I look forward to the new topic each day! It is a smart looking little book too. However I had to refrain from the 5 star rating for a couple of reasons. I find a few of the topics rather boring. Plus the print reduces to small print toward the bottom of each page. I mean really tiny. I couldn't find any explanation of why they printed it that way. I suppose to save space or to express the deepening of the topic as you read. Well, I guess I learned I might need glasses, and I don't care for the basics of music mostly. However, philosophy, science, religion... all are great!

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reviews: 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, page 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20

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