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Rating: 
Summary: Alive
Review: A truly excellent, penetrating, work. David Noss provides an opportunity for the reader to personally shake hands with each major religion: each is introduced with unobtrusive eloquence and exactitude; each is treated with the utmost respect; and so is the reader accorded this same, unpretentious, sacred reverence. One might gain the impression that a very sane and learned scholar in each religion covered is laying out for you the fundamentals and origins of his beliefs and faith, in a non-proselytizing way, for you to see. Excellent!
Rating:
Summary: Have used earlier editions for years.
Review: I have used earlier editions of this book, then named Man's Religions, since 1989 as the basis for lectures on World Religion for a community college class. I definately want to get a copy of this 10th edition! I hope in the future to be able to have this textbook for my class because then I will not need to supplement with handouts - everything I need will be right there in the book.
Rating:
Summary: The best book about religions!
Review: The key words for the book could be as the following -- Tactful, sophisticated, academic, reader's friendly, accurate, intriguing, inspiring, comprehensive. One can get proud of the Mankind history - not only wars and dirty politics did we have but the heights of spiritual life, in many forms and manifestations.
Rating:
Summary: The best book about religions!
Review: The key words for the book could be as the following -- Tactful, sophisticated, academic, reader's friendly, accurate, intriguing, inspiring, comprehensive. One can get proud of the Mankind history - not only wars and dirty politics did we have but the heights of spiritual life, in many forms and manifestations.
Rating: 
Summary: An overview of the ten editions of this book.
Review: This Tenth Edition is the first one to appear without the name of my elder brother, John B. Noss, on the cover. It is now almost twenty years since his death in 1980, but it is still in a profound sense his book. It is more than fifty years since I first "assisted" him by re-typing part of the original draft. At a time when religious studies tended to focus on the biographies of founders of religions or on comparing the diversities of contemporary practice, the preface to the first edition spoke of two special needs to be met; both were the unique concerns of historians. The first was to include "descriptive and interpretative details from the original source materials" and the second "to bridge the interval between the founding of religions and their present state." Those who have used successive editions will recognize a continuing faithfulness to those needs as well as a special a concern for an audience of teachers and students. Over the years some seven hundred institutions have adopted the book and over one hundred teachers have contributed critiques and suggestions toward the shaping of future editions. Resisting trends toward the abbreviating and "dumbing down" of college textbooks to accommodate diminishing reading skills, this edition maintains a standard of thoroughness. Instead of abridgment it offers enhancements: additional help in the form of highlighted terms keyed to its chapter-end glossaries, reinforcement of key ideas in the form of brief boxed quotations, and new line drawings to relieve solid columns of text. Many teachers find a kind of liberation in putting a thorough text in the hands of students. This insures ready and reliable reference, relieves the pressure on the instructor to "cover"everything in lectures, and frees-up class time for questions and discussion on topics of immediate interest. The study of world religions needs to encompass tne immediate and the existential as well as the rational --the empathic as well as the analytical. Serving as editor of John's book has been on the one hand a challenge to emend each inaccuracy but also a profound experience of what it is like to look out upon the world through the eyes of a wise person.Because it is John's book I dare to wish for its readers the gentle, irenic spirit of its first author.
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