Revive your Mind, Complete your Education, and Converse Confidently About our Nation's Past

THE INTELLECTUAL DEVOTIONAL TAKES ON AMERICAN HISTORY
With a page-a-day authors create a new way to countdown to next year's elections

What do Americans keep next to their bed? What do they reach for before they turn out the light? David S. Kidder and Noah Oppenheim are betting that it doesn't have to be a remote control. Last year their first book, The Intellectual Devotional, a small book-sized to approximate the spiritual guides that have traditionally had an honored spot in households, took bookstores by surprise and became an unexpected bestseller. The book has reached over 375,000 in print.

The Intellectual Devotional: American History (Modern Times/Rodale;$ 24;) is the second book in this remarkable series. Like its predecessor, The Intellectual Devotional: American History offers a year of reading--one entry for every day. The point? The subtitle of the book says it best: Revive Your Mind, Complete Your Education, and Converse Confidently about Our Nation's Past. Kidder and Oppenheim focus on what you should know -- and may have forgotten -- from seven fields of knowledge on American history and culture. By the time next year's Presidential election rolls round, the authors hope to have voters up to speed on what lies behind every decision made at the polls.

The story behind the book is as multilayered as the book itself. The authors' bring to the process an eclectic mix of backgrounds and skills (including industrial design, journalism, software development and marketing) and a team of credentialed experts in every field. Every decision about the book--from its size, color, and paper--was as conceived and considered as the content. The authors were serious from the start about creating the right book for this era.


The series is a brilliant marriage between one of the oldest kinds of books and the high-tech, too-pressed readers of today. Think of the most gloriously illustrated devotional books of the Renaissance, the Puritan's books of occasional meditations and the chapbooks which brought the printed word into even the humblest of homes. Think Poor Richard's Almanac or the Enlightenment's version (think Michel de Montaigne) and even the multi-volume Popular Educator Library of the 1930's which sought to provide "a Liberal Education of University Standard.": there is a history of books that drew from a wide variety of sources and subjects unavailable to many readers. Now, with the internet opening the gateway to unfiltered information, a book that helps winnow down the vast intake once again serves a need.

Arranging the milestones in themes, the book's layout is deceptively simple. The authors' designate Mondays for Politics and Leadership; Tuesday deals with War and Peace; Wednesday looks at Rights and Reform; Thursday is all Business; Friday tackles Building America; Saturday relaxes with Literature and Sunday extends that to covering the Arts. The entries, a page long, are meant to give not only basic information in a concise fashion but with additional notes at the end of each entry that information is extended in tangential and interesting ways. For example, to know about Cyrus McCormick (a Business entry) you'll find out about his mechanical reaper and who it impacted. You'll read how it was resisted by farmers while it became one of the catalyst for Chicago's growth into a major city. You'll also discover that his daughter-in-law was a major backer for birth control advocate Margaret Sanger and that the parts of the farm that belonged to McCormick's father is now part of Virginia Tech.

The choices for entries are both those you might expect as well as those that will surprise you and the view of America as a result is as complex and bustling as the experience of living here. The benefit of the format is how what seems like serendipity enriches the whole. Building America, for example, includes an entry for barbed wire--a utilitarian invention that altered a landscape in ways both physical and metaphoric. The entry travels from ancient Rome to Hollywood. The result is a new perspective on an everyday object--information that creates a resonation of ideas and notions about America and its character.

This is the year when to be an American will be thrown into sharp relief as candidates vie for the vote. The Intellectual Devotional with its bounty of ideas reminds all of us what is at stake each time we choose who will carry our history forward.