The book "A Year lived in a Biblical way" - A. J. Jacobs

I have heard about the experiment of A. J. Jacobs for a long time, I saw an interview with him and his presentation of the book, however, there was still no Russian translation of the book. and so, right before the New Year, I came across it on one of the sites. I ordered it as a gift for the New Year and throughout January I read it aloud before going to bed.

I will focus a little on the book itself, and then I will move on to the content. Now there is an increasing tendency to reduce the cost of books, and therefore, you often have to read beautiful texts printed on paper, a little better than toilet paper for 6 rubles from recycled newspapers: gray, thin, the letters merge, sometimes the font is crooked.

Not to mention the binding, which crumbles before the end of the first reading. It is a shame to put such books on the shelf or give them away. However, the publication "A Year lived in a biblical way" is not one of these. A very good cover, a good binding and absolutely white thick paper without glued pages. Plus, there is a tape for bookmarks, a trifle, but it's nice. The book is larger than the usual format, I imagined it to be smaller and thinner, but it is quite impressive.

During a month of active reading, the only thing that happened to the book was the bending of the corners (and then, after it was on the shelf) and the bookmark was disheveled. At the beginning of the book there is a special page for recording the name and contacts of the owner of the book, and at the end there is a place for notes (this is very convenient in the book). So, I am very happy with the publication, I would like to buy a few more books, I have already looked at them.

Now let's move on to the most interesting thing - the content. This is not a work of fiction, it is a description of the experiment in diary form. A. J. Jacobs himself is a journalist for Esquire, an agnostic Jew living in New York. He had already experimented on reading all the volumes of the encyclopedia Britannica, and after that he also tried to live a year following all the tips on a healthy lifestyle.

The very idea of the experiment - to live a year guided by the 613 rules of Judaism, and also all the instructions of Jesus from the New Testament-is interesting and bold, and since this is not done by a religious fanatic, but by a completely normal average American who has nothing to do with theology, everything becomes much more interesting.

Although I am familiar with both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, I knew about almost all the religious organizations described in the book, I learned a lot of new things, especially in theoretical terms: translations and interpretations of individual phrases, words and prohibitions, the perception of one and the same biblical phrase in absolutely different ways by different faiths, etc.

A. J. Jacobs manages to perceive everything not only with a considerable amount of humor and irony, but also to comprehend the meaning of each ritual, each rule or instruction. It would seem that how to perceive the ban on sitting on the same surface on which a woman who is menstruating was sitting?

The ban on sleeping in one bed with an unclean wife? Or an order to attach tefillin? Write the commandments on the doorposts of your house? Or blow the horn at the beginning of each month? And to build a hut and live in it for a week, in New York, in a city apartment? Nevertheless, the author manages to show not only the stupid side of the ancient commandments, but also try to tell the story of the emergence of prohibitions or, conversely, prescriptions.

Is it possible to become happy if you smile a lot? Psychologists say that yes! And is it possible to believe in God if you live by his word? AJ checks it out.

The only thing I was afraid of before reading the book was that the author would openly mock religion or scripture, although I am an atheist, but I do not like outright rudeness to believers. But my fears did not come true. Of course, it is difficult to accept the sacrifices that are being made to this day, the stoning of adulterers and the ban on cutting the edges of the beard, but on the other hand, there is something quite reasonable in the Bible that makes people become better.

In addition to the very layer of the narrative associated with the experiment, AJ Jacobs describes part of his everyday life and, so to speak, pressing problems: he and his wife Julie (an incredibly patient and rational woman, as I understood from the book) are trying to have a second child, their neighbor is trying to publish a book about her fun past in the 60s, AJ's relatives, all a little strange, have different attitudes to his experiment.

 

The book describes many meetings with representatives of different faiths and sects, all of them are described without embellishment and with a share of due respect. Now you will be able to learn: how to talk about the God of Jehovah's Witnesses, how difficult it is to get rid of the Jews, what songs the Amish sing and what it is like to attend the divine service of the serpents.

In general, I would rate the book 10 out of 10: easy, informative, humorous, emotional, fascinating, I can describe it indefinitely.