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2013 Pulitzer Prize winners: 4 excellent books

Months before the Pulitzer Prize committee got there, the Monitor's book critics had already let readers know that these four books were something special. Here's why.

2. "Devil in the Grove," by Gilbert King

  • By Monitor staff

Thurgood Marshall may be best remembered for his victory in the landmark Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. But the former Supreme Court justice did not begin his career in 1954.

"Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America," by Gilbert King, tells the story of another case tried by Marshall – a much earlier and seemingly unwinnable murder case that King argues helped to turn the young Marshall into the crusader that he would become. 

Yesterday King was awarded the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction for "Devil in the Grove."

"King’s style, at once suspenseful and historically meticulous, advances the facts of the Groveland case while simultaneously weaving together details from Marshall’s professional rise within the NAACP and his home life in Harlem," wrote Monitor book critic Meredith Bennett-Smith in her review of the book last year. "The story of the Thurgood Marshall and his Groveland Boys reminds us that man’s capacity for evil may be deep, but so is his capacity for change.

You can see the Monitor's full review of "Devil in the Grove" here.

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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.

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