Skip to footer

10 young adult books for smart readers of all ages

Here are 10 young adult books for readers of all ages who like to learn.

8. "Frozen in Time: Clarence Birdseye’s Outrageous Idea About Frozen Food," by Mark Kurlansky

  • By Ross Atkin Contributor

(Delacorte Press, 165 pp.)

This biography of Clarence Birdseye, the inventor of frozen food, recounts how he came to develop and patent the freezing process that revolutionized the way food is preserved and distributed.

EXCERPT:

“[Clarence ‘Bob’ Birdseye] accomplished the quick-freeze process by eliminating air and packing food very tightly into cartons holding a two-inch-thick block, then pressing those cartons between two plates that were kept between -20 and -50 degrees Fahrenheit. The carton was held between the freezing plates for seventy-five minutes. The blocks not only froze the food solid but compacted it into a tight, rectangle, assuring complete freezing in a short period of time and no spaces for bacteria to enter.

“Without making a scientific breakthrough, Bob had developed a process for freezing food on which an entirely new industry was founded. It was called multiplate freezing.”

8 of 10
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

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.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.