She Walks in Beauty has been near the top of the bestseller list for weeks, understandably so. Editor Caroline Kennedy, like Keillor, has a deep appreciation for poetry and deftly steers readers. Kennedy began compiling these poems after a momentous birthday made her think about passages and wayposts. The book is organized into milestones most American women share, such as falling in love, marriage, work, and motherhood. Kennedy introduces each section with a wonderful mix of anecdotes and reflections that are as engaging as many of the poems themselves. In the Breaking Up section, for example, Kennedy begins with a quote from her morose son – “Girlfriends are the worst” – and then shifts to broader ideas about endings. The poems that follow range from “Well, I Have Lost You,” by Edna St. Vincent Millay to Gwendolyn Brooks’ “when you have forgotten Sunday: the love story.” Readers will appreciate Kennedy’s ease with both familiar classics and contemporary gems.
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
