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.

3. "Embers of War," by Fredrik Logevall

Had American leaders been willing to study the failures of one of their allies, they might have spared themselves a costly and horrific military blunder. Which ally and which blunder? That would be the French and the disaster now known as the Vietnam War.

In "Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam," Cornell University historian Fredrik Logevall spells out the history of the Vietnam War and demonstrates clearly the ways in which the French colonization of Southeast Asia that began in the late 19th century deeply influenced the Americans’ failures in that region.

Yesterday Logevall was awarded the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in History for his work.

Reviewing the book last year, Monitor book critic Jordan Michael Smith called "Embers of War" an "essential work for those seeking to understand the worst foreign-policy adventure in American history." He went on to say that, "Logevall has tapped new resources, including extensive archives in France and what is available in Vietnam. He has a complete grasp of the vast literature on what the Vietnamese call The American War, and even though readers known how the story ends – as with 'The Iliad' – they will be as riveted by the tale as if they were hearing it for the first time."

You can see the Monitor's full review of "The Embers of War" here.

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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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