Skip to footer

10 smart young adult books perfect for grownups

These books may be targeted at young readers, but they won’t disappoint the adults who find them.

5. 'Thomas Paine: Crusader for Liberty,' by Albert Marrin

  • By Ross Atkin Contributor

Many of the words that fed the spirit of American independence were penned by Thomas Paine, whose 18th-century writings were immortalized in such tracts as “Common Sense” and “The Age of Reason.” This book explores how his ideas helped form a new nation. 

Here is an excerpt from Thomas Paine: Crusader for Liberty:

“Paine broke new ground by arguing that true liberty requires freedom from want. Hungry people cannot be free people because they are slaves to their stomachs. Hunger forces them to obey those who offer a morsel of food, however evil they may be. Thus, to promote freedom, Paine outlined a program to correct the abuses he had seen in England. His program called for abolishing ‘irrational and tyrannical laws’ that had children hanged for petty offenses. It also looked forward to what we today call the welfare state: free education, unemployment benefits, old-age pensions, and public housing. The money to pay for these programs, Paine noted, could easily come from a progressive tax; that is, those who earned more, paid more taxes. In 1797, Paine wrote Agrarian Justice, a more detailed plan for social reform.”

(Alfred A. Knopf, 165 pp.)

5 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.