10 best books of January 2014, according to Amazon's editors

Here are the titles the editors at Amazon like best among the January 2014 releases.

5. 'The Wind Is Not a River,' by Brian Payton

Payton, author of "The Ice Passage," tells the story of reporter John Easley, who is mourning the recent death of his brother in World War II-era Europe and goes to investigate the invasion by the Japanese of the Aleutian Islands in Alaska. When John disappears, his wife Helen goes in search of him. "It's kind of a sweeping love story," Nelson says. "It's part mystery, a love story.... we've read books like this before, but it's set in this less-known place."

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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.”

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