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Reader recommendation: The Birth House

Monitor readers share their favorite book picks.

  • By J'Marinde Shephard, St. Paul, Minn.

The Birth House by Amy McKay is an enchanting, historically based story that encompasses alternative medicine, metaphysics and, astonishingly, the baser aspects of "modern" medicine and its practitioners. That it takes place amid a most innocent and charming love story only adds to the delight of this book. This is a book that speaks to one's soul.

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Mark Sappenfield
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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.

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