I was looking forward to reviewing this book for Thomas Nelson and was profoundly disappointed. I expected a book with an indepth history of the King James Bible as well as examples of how the language, punctuation, and spelling have changed over the centuries. What I found is that the book is your typical topical gift edition. Choose a topic ranging from God's Love to Our Servanthood and you have a half dozen scriptures from the King James related to that topic. Interspersed is a brief history of the King James. The book is 164 pages and 16 of those pages are dedicated to the history of the beloved book. The history given can be found in a quick internet search and ten minutes of reading Wikipedia. They even mention that "pages 20 and 56 are adapted from wikipedia.com."
The book itself has a beautiful leather cover and gilded pages. The pages have a wonderful slick feel to them giving you the feeling of having a very expensive book. At $16.99, I would say this is an expensive book for what you get. This would make a nice gift for a new baptismal candidate or perhaps a newly ordained pastor. Outside of giving it as a gift to someone, I would not voluntarily purchase this.
If this book is a celebration of 400 years of the most popular and widely read version of a Bible, it is the equivalent to a 40th birthday party being held at Chuck E. Cheese. Instead of serving Champagne at the celebration they served a light beer. It does not celebrate the 400 years of the King James Bible and is not a beneficial resource.
4 comments:
I was afraid of that! It would disappoint me too I think! I did see somewhere that a *big* anniversary edition of the King James Bible was being released soon.
Hi Saw your review on Thomas Nelson and dropped by, my copy of this book was bound upside down and the pages are all stuck together, sounds like yours was in better shape. Enjoyed reading your review.
Brenda, yours was bound upside down! Wow! Wouldn't that be a disappointment if you had ordered it off Amazon?
My pages were stuck together, but I attributed that to the edging. I thought perhaps the gold paint caused the pages to stick.
Brenda, thanks for stopping by!
"adapted from Wikipedia"? Ouch. Extensive research done on this one then. Still, thank you for the review, at least I know to give it a pass.
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