This time around the review is actually about CD’s in addition to a book. This is a partial description from the Thomas Nelson site. “Three CDs include 30 spoken Psalms from The Word of Promise™ Old Testament Audio Bible, enhanced by a fully orchestrated music score and devotional content, read by the world’s finest talent, including: Jason Alexander, Joan Allen, Sean Astin, Richard Dreyfuss, Harry Hamlin, Marcia Gay Harden, Stacy Keach, Jesse McCartney, Malcolm McDowell, Gary Sinise, and Michael York.” You can check it out here.
Read on for my review…
I was excited to get this because I find it much easier to listen to scripture than to try to read it. When I signed up to review this I thought it was only the CD’s I would be getting. I was surprised to find in addition to the CD’s that there was a book as well, enabling you to read along if you so choose. However it’s only 30 of the 50 psalms that are read. So if you are expecting to listen to all 50, that is not the case. In addition to the psalms being read, the devotional portion is spoken by a different narrator than the actor reading the psalm.
That being said, there are a few things that I didn’t like and this ended up not being such a favorable review. The first happened when I was importing the CD’s into iTunes. Disc 1 did not automatically have the track titles for each psalm. I had to manually enter those when I created my playlist. When I imported discs 2 & 3 I did not have this problem.
The next thing I encountered, (and it’s not necessarily a problem if you are only using the discs), is when I tried to read along with the psalm in the book and listen to the CD, the entire psalm was not printed in the book. Only a portion of the psalm was on each page accompanying that track. The narrator did read the entire accompanying devotional portion and prayer at the end. This being the case, I had to get my bible to read the entire psalm along with the actor, then switch to the book in order to read along with the narrator.
All in all, I will use this for primarily for the CD portion and leave the book on the shelf. It is a great way to study the psalms and have an entire month of devotionals on just that. The actors voices are all pleasing to listen to and familiar and the narrator is engaging. Note to the publisher, it didn’t meet my expectations of what I thought I was getting. I would like to have seen all 50 of the psalms read that were in the book as well as printed out on the page. I think that would make it a great tool for Sunday school classes or small groups to use as a study tool.
