384 pages, Rodale Books, ISBN-13: 978-1594867446
So, I buy lots of books every year, virtually all of them on sale, on clearance, or used, or whatever. And I fully intend to read each and every one of them. Someday. When I was cleaning my room the other day, I found this little gem, The Intellectual Devotional: American History; Revive Your Mind, Complete Your Education, and Converse Confidently about Our Nation’s Past, by David S. Kidder and Noah D. Oppenheim, with about an inch-worth of dust on the cover, but more interestingly with a voucher for something called “Watch Me Move: The Animation Show”, which was exhibited at the Detroit Institute of Arts (one of my many ex-jobs) from October 6th, 2013 through January 5th, 2014. So that’s how long this particular work has been awaiting my attention. It should consider itself lucky.
So, The Intellectual Devotional: American History is a kind of mini-encyclopedia with 365 entries across seven aspects of American History; these would be: Politics & Leadership; War & Peace; Rights & Reform; Business; Building America; Literature and Arts. The idea behind the devotional is to read one page per day, but I found myself so absorbed that I would typically read a whole week’s worth at a sitting. Naturally, you can’t fit much onto a single page – especially as the book is only about 8” tall – so each entry is brief in the extreme. And the print size! Jesus! It starts out small and gets ever-smaller as you move down the page! I get the constraints of the format, but maybe Rodale Books should have splurged and printed a larger book. I mean, I love to read, but the formatting of this thing made it a chore.
For what it is, the writing is agreeable enough, but what concerns me most is the accuracy of the information being imparted. For instance, according to Kidder and Oppenheim, John Smith and his followers, “[e]xhausted by the long voyage…landed on a small, uninhabited island in Virginia off the coast of Chesapeake Bay…” Um, the last I checked, Jamestown was built on the James River, not a minor mistake. But wait, there’s more: the Pequot Wars began in 1634 not 1636; the Haitian Revolution began in 1791 not 1793; and Ulysses S. Grant died in 1885 not 1855. I’m sure there are (many) other mistakes besides these, but I haven’t counted them all up. Yet. So I guess I will continue to read The Intellectual Devotional: American History, but with my cellphone by my side, ready to fact-check the authors at every turn.
So, The Intellectual Devotional: American History is a kind of mini-encyclopedia with 365 entries across seven aspects of American History; these would be: Politics & Leadership; War & Peace; Rights & Reform; Business; Building America; Literature and Arts. The idea behind the devotional is to read one page per day, but I found myself so absorbed that I would typically read a whole week’s worth at a sitting. Naturally, you can’t fit much onto a single page – especially as the book is only about 8” tall – so each entry is brief in the extreme. And the print size! Jesus! It starts out small and gets ever-smaller as you move down the page! I get the constraints of the format, but maybe Rodale Books should have splurged and printed a larger book. I mean, I love to read, but the formatting of this thing made it a chore.
For what it is, the writing is agreeable enough, but what concerns me most is the accuracy of the information being imparted. For instance, according to Kidder and Oppenheim, John Smith and his followers, “[e]xhausted by the long voyage…landed on a small, uninhabited island in Virginia off the coast of Chesapeake Bay…” Um, the last I checked, Jamestown was built on the James River, not a minor mistake. But wait, there’s more: the Pequot Wars began in 1634 not 1636; the Haitian Revolution began in 1791 not 1793; and Ulysses S. Grant died in 1885 not 1855. I’m sure there are (many) other mistakes besides these, but I haven’t counted them all up. Yet. So I guess I will continue to read The Intellectual Devotional: American History, but with my cellphone by my side, ready to fact-check the authors at every turn.
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