Customer Reviews

The Complete Book of Hymns

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book is a hefty volume at almost 700 pages, but, of course, it covers 600 hymns and praise songs. Each entry averages just over 1 page in length. All the old standards are covered, as well as many less commonly-known ones, including many that I do not know. By far, most of the entries are hymns. Off hand, I'd probably say that around 90% or more of the songs referenced were written before 1950. This book is well-organized. The songs are organized by topic, and there are indexes by title, author, and theme.

Here is a sample entry that I opened to randomly: I Need Thee Every Hour. We learn the hymn was written by a 37-year-old Brooklyn housewife while she was busy with her household chores. She could closely feel the nearness of God, and she sat by an open window and wrote out all the verses. When she gave them to her pastor, he wrote the chorus and the music. Evangelist Dwight L. Moody discovered the hymn and began using it in his meetings, which led to it becoming famous. After that background information, we are given several Bible verse references (not the text of the verses themselves) related to the hymn's topic (Psalm 86:1-4, Psalm 109:22, Philippians 4:19), the themes of the hymn (prayer, meditation), and then the lyrics of the hymn.

I have a few small gripes with the book. There are several newer praise songs that do not have lyrics included, presumably because they are under copyright and permission was not granted for their use. And, there are a few of these newer praise songs that are rather short that I would have left out, but that's a small gripe.

Overall, this is a valuable resource for any Christian. This book is nice for looking up a particular hymn, but also for just browsing through. In that sense, it could be a good "coffee table book," while also being of benefit in personal or family devotions, or church music ministry. It might also be a way to find some new hymns of value. You can always look up a hymn at CyberHymnal to hear the accompanying music! I highly recommend this book.

Many book titles are misleading; but not this one. This is a BIG BOOK of Hymn stories. Highly recommended if you need/want this kind of info about the history of the church hymns we sing.

This useful book gives a short history of most popular hymns that you will encounter in the Protestant churches. The music in not included, but all the words to all the verses are there. It has proven valuable when giving a brief history before singing a hymn. The participants are much more appreciative of the hymn after hearing a story about how it was written.

Most of the histories given are about the author of the words and not about the composers of the hymns.

Conducting worship services at a Senior's Care facility, I find that they love to sing especially the old hymns but have short attention spans when it comes to sermons or messages. This book allows me to use a recommended scripture passage and then a little bit about the background and composer of each hymn rather than a long message. The participants are very interested in this information, the feed back has been very positive. As well the themes of the hymn is listed and the words of the hymns are also printed which makes it easy for someone who doesn't read music to read the words and compare to the theme for clarity.

It does have just about every hymn in it that I am interested in but navigating it on a Kindle is very difficult. While I think I would buy it again, it needs work for it to be used on a KIndle. So while the content would be 5 star, the difficulty of getting to a hymn you want to read would make it maybe a 2 star for an average of 3 star. I am sure the physical book is different.

I would have thought that a book described as "The Complete Book of Hymns" would have included sheet music and complete lyrics. It does not. All the hymn books I have ever seen include the lyrics and the sheet music for piano. This is a real disappointment.

I am very pleased with this book, with the seller, with everything. It was quick and simple and a great savings.

this special book contains a (very) good overview of so many stories on hymns, and is a great joy to read and learn.

The content of this book is great (read other reviews for details), but reading it on a Kindle using the iPhone/iPod interface is more frustrating than I'd imagined. Note that I frequently read a variety of books (fiction and non-fiction) in electronic format (Stanza and Kindle) so it's not the typical "reading on an iPhone" issues that I'm concerned with--my complaints are specific to how this title works with the Kindle iPhone platform.

The book features each hymn with these components: 1) A summary of the author. 2) An account/story of the hymn. 3) Biblical references. 4) The lyrics of the hymn. Unfortunately, items 1, 3 and 4, in conversion to Kindle formatting, appear to be created as a separate *images* not text. This means that those elements behave as if they were a picture or graphic image and they don't enlarge as the text does when the letter size is adjusted.

In this title, the summary is at a smaller type size so when you try to make it larger through the pinch/spread method, it only opens up another window with the image/pseudo-text in it and then you must close that image before continuing to read.

This makes for a very laborious "reading" process (read, enlarge, close, continue reading the text, repeat...). It's like opening up a series of images and closing them, not smoothly reading between the various 1-4 elements of each hymn. Yuck!

Additionally, while there is an active table of contents, the contents are listed by "theme" of the hymn. With 600 hymns, I can't guess the theme of a specific hymn I'm looking for (e.g. is it under "Assurance" or "Comfort and Peace"?) so finding songs is pretty tough. There's an index, but of course it isn't active and it lists the title's page number as on a "physical" book. I haven't found a way to cross-reference that page to the "virtual" pages (which, of course vary, depending upon the size of text selected).

As I said, the content is still great, but I was counting on using this more easily to read and find favorite hymns. The Kindle edition for iPhone doesn't make that easy. I would have saved the $10 if I'd known this ahead of time.

This is the largest review of hymn histories that I have seen. Because hymns are short sermons and their stories need to be told, I use this book as my main source of information concerning Christian hymns at Sunday School and church gatherings. The book will be well used. Thank you for providing much needed information. Amazon has been my book store for fifteen years.