The Intellectual Devotional: American History: Revive Your Mind, Complete Your Education, and Converse Confidently about Our Nation's Past

The Intellectual Devotional: American History, is history lite.

Divided into seven fields of knowledge, (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 read half the book in one sitting.

This book is more about the tip of the iceberg rather than an in-depth look at American history, but it is fascinating nonetheless. It's perfect when you only have a few minutes for reading.

On the downside, the fonts are too small for the average reader, so you might find yourself reaching for those drugstore readers. There are obvious editing errors that I found distracting. If you are a true student of history, this is probably not the book for you.

Still, it is great fun, makes a wonderful coffee table book or gift, and opens a window to our collective past.

The only thing I can say is that if you liked the 1st edition, you will also enjoy this one.

Aristotle's theory of matter and form is one of the most important and influential aspects of his philosophy. He saw the world was populated by substances -- concrete individual things, like plants and animals. He attempts to explain the natural world before the advances of modern science. Although many people, believers and atheists alike, argue the existence of God. Philosophers since Aristotle have tried to prove it. Charles Darwin wrote The Origin of Species which proposed the theory that populations evolve over time.

The Parthenon was constructed between 447 and 432 BC on the Acropolis in Athens, Greece and was dedicated to Athena. There is a replica in Nashville, TN, with a tall statue of Athena. During the Dark Ages, after 476 AD, Charlemagne became the ruler of a huge circumverance and was crowned leader of Christendom. Recent genetic studies show that a large percentage of Europeans descend from this Frankish king.

The Sistine Chapel in the Vatican is best known for the ceiling painted by Michelangelo between 1508 and 1512. His scenes and ignudi (along with five pagan sibyls) covered the original painting of a starry sky. The God creating man was placed over the cardinals side of the chapel.

Andrew Jackson founded a new political party, the Democrats, and became the nation's first democratic president. When Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 election with the support of the Northern abolitionists, the Southern states seceded, sparking the Civil War. John Brown was an activist who with his sons created a fiasco at Harper's Ferry and, as a consequence, he was hanged on the spot.

This is the most sloppily edited book I've ever read. Did it even have a proofreader? Page after page suffers errors in dates and basic facts.

Here is a very typical error in the discussion of the Battle of Antietam in 1862. "Nearly 100,000 soldiers participated in the battle--a force of greater size than the entire army that had fought the American Revolution seventy years earlier." So the Revolutionary War was being fought in 1798?

Seriously, this kind of simple error is all over the place. The previous volume had its own errors (there was an article about Mormon prophet Joseph Smith with a random photograph attached claiming to be him), but this one is terrible. And this is just the stuff I know. I hate to think how many errors there are in total because you have to assume that any fact-checking was equally slipshod.

I didn't use The Intellectual Devotional in the way it was intended. (That is, reading one entry each day for a year.)

Forget that! There was no way that I was going to wait 24 hours between its excellent and varied entries.

Regarding the few less-than-favorable reader reviews this book has garnered, some do criticize the smallish fonts the authors employ... to these readers, I say muscle up and break out the bi-focals. Each page in this book is devoted to one particular aspect of US history, and on the occasions when I clucked my tongue because some choice tidbit had been left out of a notable American's biography, I'd look the page over again and realize that a profound amount of pithy and important information HAD been included... in short, the Devotional had done as good a job as could be done.

Speaking of pithy, I am now anything but. Buy two copies of this book; one for you, and one for me. (I gave my copy away. Wasn't that a nice gesture?)