Hal Urban

A very simple but on the whole wonderful book about the capacity of positive words to change people's mental horizons and their relationships with other people. I picked up a lot of good quotes and thoughts from it.

A couple of minor points, the author confuses the history of the spoken and written language at the start. He also probably lays it on a bit thick with the 1960s bashing. But these were very minor points.

This book is a rich and flowing river of timeless wisdom and commonsense truth for living life to fullest. He writes, the lessons he has chosen to write about are essential ones, lessons that he wish he had known when he was younger. I want our kids to do more than simply these lessons bu to apply them. Ancient Chinese proverb tells us; I hear...and I forget, I see... and I remember. I do ...and I understand

I picked up the original 20 Things I Want My Kids to Know in 1992 as my wife and I were starting to plan for children. We found the book encouraging and got us thinking about what life lessons we wanted to model and pass on to our kids. We found a significant overlap between the 20 lessons in this book to the lessons we thought where important. I had thought this book was out of print so I have been recommending the book Never Mind the Joneses which touches on many on the same themes though show more is more explicitly Christian in it morality. I discovered that Life's Greatest Lessons was essentially the same content, just with a new title and publisher. I likely this book enough to repurchase it in e-book form. show less

This is a book that I will read with my daughters. Terrific insight into what it really means to be human. Puts life priorities back into the right order.