Customer Reviews

The Intellectual Devotional Modern Culture: Revive Your Mind, Complete Your Education, and Converse Confidently with the Culturati

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I love this whole series of books, they give a overview on many topics and are very educational. I try to make it a point to read on at least one subject a night and it makes me feel good that I'm learning or refreshing my mind on things from the past that I learned in school. These books really do make you feel intellectual.

"The Intellectual Devotional" is designed on the same format as a religious devotional - a small bit of inspiration every day. In this case, it is designed to be a small bit of learning every day. It is not set up with specific dates (Such as Thursday, October 23), but it starts with Monday of Week 1 and works it way through the year. There are 16 CDs in this set, with an estimated length of a little more than 3 minutes for each day and a little more than 17 hours overall.

The topics vary widely. The first CD ranges from Sigmund Freud to Hal Roach (the man behind the Little Rascals). The topics are interesting and I found myself dispensing with the intended one-a-day format and listening to upwards of 20 of them as I putter around the kitchen.

The only complaint I have is that there is no index included to remind the listener of the location of interesting entries. Unlike the book version, I really can't easily go flipping through it until I find the entry I'm looking for.

Nonetheless, this one comes highly recommended by this reviewer.

If you frequent dinner parties or social situations that call for cultural conversations, this is the book for you. The book is dated, and you read a page a day. It will give you a brief history or description of something you may or may not have already known about. It will make you more knowledgeable in many aspects of modern culture.

The only reason I'm giving this 4 stars instead of 5 is because it was a little more difficult to enjoy this as an audio book. The years of everyone and everything are listed after they are said and it gets a bit tedious to listen to because of that. I'm not sure how else that could have been handled, but I do think it wouldn't bother me so much in printed form. That said, I really enjoyed listening to this and got through it rather quickly as I drove around doing my errands over a few weeks time. I feel like I learned a lot!

I like the format of the book where a different subject is "studied" each day. This is a good way to get a well-rounded cultural education and I plan to listen to it with my kids on our next long car trip. We will probably skip through a few of the entries but I bet they will really enjoy it. This is a great resource for homeschoolers! (we love to carschool)

I love listening to books in the car, and I was excited to get this one and learn some things in the process. I like the idea of learning something while I am driving myself and others around. I have to drive, so why waste time being mindless? And this book seemed promising. However, I think it would be better as a bedside book or bathroom book rather than on CD. The little devotionals were too short for a car ride and it was all scattered information that didn't link. I need something in the car that flows and is easy to follow. There are too many distractions on the road to really concentrate on short snippets of information. Maybe I would feel different about it if the information linked to itself and flowed. It would be better to listen to it while you are doing some short kind of mindless activity around the house.
I appreciate the information, but it would be better in book form.

This is the 3rd installment in the Intellectual Devotional series and I recommend the series. There are 365 entries and I keep the book on beside my bed and read an entry every night. I even photocopy pages when I go on vacation so I don't get behind!

Nice book would recommend to anyone looking for enlightened tidbits of good information. Well put together and presented in great read what you want format.Passages are long enough to get message across yet short enough to not have unnecessary filler.

Did you ever wonder about who the Marx brothers were? Did you know that four of Sigmund Freud's sisters died in concentration camps? This book gives you 365 gifts....one (or more??) for each day of the year. Tales of the author, tales of the actor, ideology, why did Zionism start??
A fabulous book, with 365 different articles on things you know about, but not ENOUGH about!
This book will help any conversation, and if you are shy at cocktail parties, you'll have enough info here to make you a hit!

I like devotionals - A LOT!!! And I had high hopes for this one.

But the Kindle edition of this book lacks an active table of contents, an index - and none of the various items I've read are even numbered (as in other devotionals of my experience). And even if the entries WERE numbered, there's no way to move from one to the next, or back several to revisit a memorable entry, without moving through the pages one by one.

So what we have here is a big, lumpy ball o' facts - unorganized, unlinked in any way, and no more navigable than the vegetation-clogged upper reaches of the Amazon, Nile or Congo rivers.

At the very least, I think the publishers of this volume should add an active TOC, an index, and number the entries - and then re-send it FREE to the Kindle owners like me who already have it.

While the content of this book is lively (though not as good as earlier ones like American History) the binding is attrocious. I had to return two copies because of smudges on the cover. A third copy, sent as a replacement, had a fine cover but the insides were upside down! What is going on? Someone needs to do a little better quality control job! I won't be ordering more copies any time soon...