Book Description: Millions of Americans keep bedside books of prayer and meditative reflection - collections of daily passages to stimulate spiritual thought and advancement. The Intellectual Devotional is a secular version of the same - a collection of 365 short lessons that will inspire and invigorate the reader every day of the year. Each daily digest of wisdom is drawn from one of seven fields of knowledge: history, literature, philosophy, mathematics and science, religion, fine arts, and music.About the Author:
David S. Kidder, is an entrepreneur with a wide range of technology and marketing experience. Kidder and his companies have appeared in articles in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and other publications.
Noah D. Oppenheim, a producer of NBC's Today show, has extensive experience in television and print journalism. He has produced and reported for Scarborough Country and Hardball with Chris Matthews, and his writing has appeared in Esquire, the Wall Street Journal, Men?s Health, and the Weekly Standard.
REVIEW
Each year many of us have a resolution of self-impovement. Outside of diets and income the next most popular resolution is improving our knowledge and wisdom. So many board games or television shows (e.g The History Channel) have been developed in the past decade to capitalize on this universal desire.
After all how many of you worry about sounding intelligent during dinner parties or "intellectual conversations" at work or with friends? If so, the Intellecual Devotional is required reading.
The concept is that understands and respects the way most of us live. Way too busy to actually take the time to each day to identify what we want to learn, research it and than actually read it. For most of us having a book exclusively to a specific topic is much more information and time than we need or want.
The Intellecutal Devotion provides a concise information each day of the week (usually one page) about a topic you should have learned about in school. Each day is deticated to a particuar topic...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.
The idea is not to make you an expert as much as it is to allow you to have a conversational knowledge of each topic.
I found this to be a thourghly enjoyable book. However the most fun is sharing your new found knowledge with your family or friends. Each dayI shared my new found knowledge with those I engaged in conversation each day. The results were easy to measure. Some shrugged, but others picked up on the conversation and we found ourselves talking about things more interesting than what was on television the night before.
There were to aspects of this book that I did not anticipate.... First, after a few weeks, my friends and family were eagerly anticipating my tidpit of the day. They began to view me differently, asking me for advice critical aspects of their life... it seems that they started to view me as intelligent and wanted my advice.
The major change that I did not anticipate was that some of these topics so intrigued me, that I sought out more information about the subject...good example of knowledge begetting knowledge.
I would highly recommed this book to those who love to learn and increase their knowledge.
This book may be purchased from The BookWise BookStore
