4 audiobooks for nonfiction readers

3. 'The Wind in the Reeds: The Storm, a Play, and the City that Would Not Be Broken,' by Wendell Pierce

(Read by Wendell Pierce; Penguin Audio; 9 CDs; 11.5 hours; $40)

Actor Wendell Pierce was in New Orleans visiting his parents as Hurricane Katrina decimated the city. Pierce helped them rebuild and stayed to film the show "Treme" and later staged “Waiting for Godot,” in the devastated Lower Ninth Ward. Pierce's descriptions of the destruction of his parents’ home on Lake Pontchartrain are especially touching, but he spends more time discussing his career and religion than one would expect from the title. A seasoned actor, Pierce has a commanding voice, but here he sounds a bit too stagey and occasionally overly dramatic. This is two books forced into one space, and the sections devoted to New Orleans are the more interesting.

Grade: B

 

 

3 of 4

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.

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