Customer Reviews

The Intellectual Devotional: Revive Your Mind, Complete Your Education, and Roam Confidently with the Cultured Class

5 star:		(88)
4 star:		(42)
3 star:		(19)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

"The Intellectual Devotional" is an intriguing concept and fairly well executed. Each day of the week features a brief, one page article about a given subject, followed by a smattering of "additional facts"--Monday's topic is history, Tuesday's is literature, Wednesday's is the visual arts, Thursday's is science, Friday's is music, Saturday's is philosophy and Sunday's is religion. I've been reading the book for a couple of weeks now, and I've found the brief essays to be informative, up-to-date and (on topics with which I'm already familiar) accurate. I read each daily "devotional" at breakfast over a cup of coffee, and it's a pleasant way to start the day (and certainly less painful than the newspaper).

Several of the reviews on Amazon have criticized the book's small type, and this is in fact something to be wary of if you have vision problems. The first paragraph on each page is in what appears to be a regular-sized font, but subsequent paragraphs are quite a bit smaller. The "Additional Facts" (which set out some of the most intriguing ideas on each page) are quite small indeed.

Do you frequently find yourself at a loss for words? Are you the constant listener to someone else's mindless chatter simply because you can't think of anything interesting to say?
Authors Kidder and Oppenheim offer factual options in this cleverly written book to enliven your conversations and broaden your knowledge on a variety of subjects. Their compilation offers History, Literature, Visual Arts, Science, Music, Philosophy and Religion explained in brief one page summaries. Each day you read one page only, absorb it. By the end of the week you will have explored each field of knowledge at least once a week. As your knowledge expands, so does your confidence and your conversations have more interesting substance.

Each day, while reading the book, I shared the information I had learned with my husband and friends who were delighted to discuss Ernest Hemingway, Cloning, illusion vs reality, Hammurabi's code of Laws, Noah, Plato, The Solar System, Vaccines, Albert Einstein, the Solar system, Da Vinci, Plato, Handel, atoms, Aristotle, Mozart, and Vermeer's "Girl with a Pearl Earring" painting, just to mention a few passages. Actress Scarlett Johanssen portrayed "the girl" in a recent film based on Vermeer's life, so we gained more insight into how that portrait, "Girl with a Pearl Ear-ring," manifested, then our conversation strayed naturally to the quality of current motion pictures like "The Horse Whisperer" and " Island," in which Scarlett Johanssen was also featured, and that is exactly the purpose of this book, "to wake up our brains," enliven our thoughts, enhance our communication skills so that we become more confident and knowledgeable and stop hesitating to engage in diverse and dynamic conversations.


No need to be a hesitant, shy, silent observer. After reading this book, step into life armed with more knowledge and facts!

What a fabulous concept! As a fan of daybooks and devotionals, I love the idea of this book. Covering seven key areas of knowledge, one for each day of the week, it delivers what it promises in the title and subtitle. I would have given the book FIVE stars if it weren't for the incredibly SMALL TYPE that makes reading very difficult for middle-aged readers like me -- especially at the end of the day. I am hoping that the publishers will release a "large print" version for anyone past 50. I will look forward to more editions of this wonderful book. Other than the typesize, it's highly recommended.

This is a fun book, no doubt about it, and quite educational in its own right. But it is also full of errors and misrepresentations from page one -- mostly minor ones, but even those are glaring embarrassments for a work which continually flaunts how "intellectual" and "cultured" it is.

The very first entry, for example, deals with "Egyptian hieroglyphics." Any amateur Egyptologist worth his or her salt will immediately tell you that the proper term is "hieroglyphs" -- "hieroglyphic" is the adjectival form of the word. A nitpick, perhaps, but one that tends to raise the hackles of Egyptian history professors.

Later entries contain cringe-inducing mistakes, such as the claim that the Hebrew Torah is the Christian Old Testament. In fact, the Hebrew Tanakh is equivalent to the (Protestant) Old Testament: the Torah consists only of the Pentateuch, the Five Books of Moses. This is not a minor point.

Other entries contain not so much outright errors, but a lack of nuanced understanding. To refer to the Mass as a "ritual reenactment," for instance, may pass muster for a Calvinist, but would make any Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Episcopalian, etc. wince at the authors' lack of understanding.

In short, it's certainly a book worth buying and enjoying. But take its summaries with a grain of salt. Tackling such massive swathes of learning necessitates that the work be far wider than it is deep.

A great book to keep on your nightstand....Am planning to give it to my former co-workers for the holidays...As a retired teacher, I know that what often effects students' reading ability is their lack of "background knowledge" in different disciplines. I can see this book being used in the classroom as a fun way to build up this knowledge.

I am enjoying the Intellectual Devotional, though I am troubled when I come across screaming errors like "Marie Antoinette said 'Let them eat cake.'" I can't imagine any serious historian would miss this error, so how qualified were the editors? And if the information is wrong, what is the point of the book?

I love this book and the idea behind it - have fun, enrich your life, brush up on key knowledge you should know or have forgotten...and all in concise manageable chunks. I enjoy having it on my nightstand and look forward to reading a fascinating new nugget every night before I go to bed. I would highly recommend it

I was excited by the idea of this book since I would love to extend my knowledge of history and the arts. However, in the first few weeks of owning this book, I have found factual errors in almost half of the articles I've read. (I didn't assume I knew anything; I checked the facts.) Who knows what errors I did not find. The science articles, with whose topics I am familiar, are poorly written and often give the wrong impression of the state and/or understanding of the topic. My immediate concern was that readers of this book will take away the many misstatements and believe themselves educated. Given the overwhelmingly positive reviews of this book, my fears appear to be justified. Please do not take the pages of this book to be the whole story, or even representative of the story. If nothing else, this book serves at least to whet the intellectual appetite of those willing to read more of one the many topics.

I was enamored with the general idea of this book, however I found the actual execution of it lacking. On the subjects that I know a little something about I have found numerous errors.

For example, page 214, science subject of `Batteries' repeatedly refers to the positive terminal of a battery as a `cathode' and the negative terminal as an `anode', the correct designations are `anode' is positive and `cathode' is negative. Or page 183, Thomas Jefferson, additional fact 3 states: `...According to a recent DNA study by one historian, Jefferson fathered a number of children with one of them, Sally Hemings.' While it is technically correct that some historians initially reached this conclusion, more recent studies have found that: `...the Jefferson-Hemings allegation is by no means proven... the most likely alternative is that Randolph Jefferson, Thomas's younger brother... [...].

While some may say that the above examples are trivial errors and the overall book is very good, I would argue that any book that claims to `Revive Your Mind (and) Complete Your Education' should pay a bit more attention to the details of that education. Or to put it another way, if I know of several errors on subjects I know something about, how many falsehoods am I absorbing on subjects of which I have no idea what is true or not?

This book is a nice idea, but it contains some factual errors. For example, the authors state that Jonathan Swift wrote "A Modest Proposal" in response to the British government's handling of the Irish Potato Famine of 1841-51. Swift's famous satirical piece was actually written more than a hundred years earlier, in 1729, and so it had nothing to do with the Potato Famine.