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.

8. 'Discover Ancient Rome', by Deborah Kops

  • By Ross Atkin Contributor

While some of the basic facts about ancient Rome are familiar to many, here’s a short work that provides a crash course in everything from the city’s founding and laws to the mythology, religion, customs, and lives of its ordinary citizens.

Here’s an excerpt from Discover Ancient Rome:

“A Roman family’s diet depended on their social status. Those with little money ate wheat, which was probably boiled because the poor usually did not have ovens for baking. They also ate beans and leeks, but meat was a luxury. In modest homes, cheap wine and vinegar mixed with water were common beverages. Romans of all classes disapproved of drinking wine without water. Romans used milk to make cheese, but they did not drink it. They thought only uncivilized people drank milk!”

(Enslow Publishers, Inc., 112 pp.)

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.