1. Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls, by David Sedaris, Little Brown
2. Lean In, by Sheryl Sandberg, Knopf
3. This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral-Plus, Plenty of Valet Parking!-In America's Gilded Capital- Debut, by Mark Leibovich, Blue Rider
4. Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth- Debut, by Reza Aslan, Random House
5. I Could Pee on This, by Francesco Marciuliano, Chronicle
6. The Boys in the Boat, by Daniel James Brown, Viking
7. William Shakespeare's Star Wars, by Ian Doescher, Quirk
8. Vader's Little Princess, by Jeffrey Brown, Chronicle
9. Darth Vader and Son, by Jeffrey Brown, Chronicle
10. I Wear the Black Hat, by Chuck Klosterman, Scribner
11. The Unwinding, by George Packer, FSG
12. Cooked, by Michael Pollan, Penguin Press
13. The Drunken Botanist, by Amy Stewart, Algonquin
14. The Guns at Last Light, by Rick Atkinson, Holt
15. Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand, Random House
On the Rise:
22. Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations, by Peter Evans, Ava Gardner, S&S
In this candid memoir, Peter Evans describes his late-night conversations with the legendary Hollywood star of the 40s and 50s, Ava Gardner.
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.
