10 Women Who Changed the World

Title: 10 Women Who Changed the World
Author: Daniel L. Akin
Major Themes: Biographies, Missionaries, Devotionals
Synopsis: A biographical devotional telling about the lives of ten women of faith from the past few centuries, woven together with stirring applications from the Bible.

There are some for-review books I request that I’m somewhat ambivalent about as to whether I get them or not, but when I saw 10 Women Who Changed the World come up, I knew I wanted to read it. I’ve always enjoyed stories about missionaries, and when I looked through the list of women this book told about, I was even more intrigued. These aren’t just your typical missionary stories; at least one of these women never even made it to the field! But what I loved was the way their stories are told in a rather matter-of-fact, but easily readable manner; these women come to life in these pages, through their writings and other people’s observations of them. Add to that the devotional aspect of this book, and it made for a book I both wanted to rush through to get to know all the women, and one I wanted to slow down and savor, because it was that good.

Publisher’s description:

My thoughts:

I thoroughly enjoyed 10 Women Who Changed the World. For the first half or so of the book, I allowed myself to just slow down and savor it—pick it up and read a portion, then put it down to mull over it, before picking it up again later. For the last few chapters, I did speed up my reading, mostly because I wanted to finish reading it before the publication date. Either way, though, I think you’d get a lot out of it. I came away from the story in awe at what God has done in people’s lives, and with a desire to love and serve Him more.

I found the selection of women for this book to be wide-ranging and unique. Many of these women are ones that you wouldn’t typically read about in classic missionary stories. Maybe their stories just aren’t written yet (the Benges have done an amazing job trying to share a bunch of them, but they can’t do everyone!), and perhaps for some of these women, we just don’t know enough about their lives to be able to write entire books about them, anyway. Either way, going into this book, I knew maybe three of these women’s stories, and everyone else was new to me—so it was fun to explore their stories this way!

The devotional aspect of the book was also interesting. I personally found it slightly clunky; we’d be finding out about this woman’s life, then switch to some discussion about the passage that was being applied, and then switch back to talking about the woman’s life again. Still, I found both parts of each chapter—the biographical and devotional parts—encouraging and inspiring, and I’m glad they were both there. I thought the Scriptural portions did bring nuance to the biographies, and vice versa.

I’m planning to keep my eyes open for any books Akin releases in the future. This was a great read, one that I’d love to have on my shelf one day, and I’m also thinking about ordering copies for a few friends of mine! I love it when people can resurrect other Christian’s stories, both old and new like this—it’s a great reminder of the God we serve, and what He can do through us if we are willing vessels in His hand. Highly recommended!

I was given a complimentary copy of this book, and this is my honest opinion of it.

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Christian Heroes: Then and Now Series The Timechart History of the World I Heard Good News Today The Story of the World series