10 coffee table books that make great gifts

Stuck for a present for that friend that's hard to shop for? Check out one of these gorgeous coffee table books.

9. 'Tarzan: The Centennial Celebration,' by Scott Tracy Griffin

The character created by Edgar Rice Burroughs who grew up in the jungle and is best known for his ululating call is fêted in the new book "Tarzan: The Centennial Celebration." Griffin's book includes commentary on all the "Tarzan" novels as well as offering every bit of Tarzan media from comic strips to movie stills and discussing key bits of "Tarzan" lore such as the lost-race plot device. "Edgar Rice Burroughs was enamored of this concept, planting lost cities and tribes around the world and across the solar system," Griffin writes. "He ... included lost races or cities in all but five of the Tarzan novels."

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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.

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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