10 best books of April 2017, according to Amazon's editors

Looking for a book to dive into for spring? Check out the titles that Amazon editors say are the best to be released this month.

10. 'Prussian Blue,' by Philip Kerr

"The Other Side of Silence" writer Kerr's new book is another story about Bernie Gunther. It's now 1956, and Gunther, who is working as a concierge at the Grand Hotel on the French Riviera, is coerced into killing an agent in London. When Bernie runs into Friedrich Korsch, a former Gestapo homicide detective whom Bernie knew when he was part of the SS, Bernie thinks back to a murder case he and Friedrich were ordered to solve in 1939. Reading this book is like "getting lost in another world," Schluep says.

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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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