Though Thai restaurants and cookbooks are plentiful, the cuisine of bordering Burma has had far less exposure in US culture. Unless you’ve traveled to the country or know a Burmese cook, it’s likely that you’ve never had a chance to try Burmese food, and that is a shame because it’s among the most nuanced and interesting cuisine in Southeast Asia. "Burma: Rivers of Flavor" is the first comprehensive Burmese cookbook published in the United States, and it couldn’t have come out too soon. Because Burma is a “crossroads country,” you’ll find influences from India and China in these pages, as well as Thailand and other Southeast Asian cultures. The recipes are great for home cooks: easy to follow, hard to mess up, and comprised of affordable, easy-to-find ingredients
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.”
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