10 young adult books for readers of all ages who want to learn

Don't avoid these titles because they're billed for younger readers. These are fascinating books for all ages.

9. "Ida M. Tarbell: The Woman Who Challenged Big Business – and Won!," by Emily Arnold McCully

(Clarion Books, 288 pp.)

The life of pioneering journalist Ida M. Tarbell, whose exposés of the Standard Oil Trust led to important government regulations of big business, offers a window on America at the turn of the 20th century. 

Here's an excerpt from "Ida M. Tarbell":

When Ida Tarbell “began looking for documentation of Standard Oil’s involvement in the SIC [South Improvement Company episode of railroad price fixing and kickbacks], the same people who had advised her to refrain from looking closely at the trust insisted that Standard Oil had destroyed all records of the episode. Ida refused to believe that. More sleuthing indicated that there were three extant copies of a pamphlet produced in 1873 called The Rise and Fall of the South Improvement Company, two in private collections. The owner refused to let her see them. Then a bibliographer at the New York Public Library told her that yes, heads of railroads had bought nearly every copy of the pamphlet and had destroyed them. But there was one left – in the library. Now Ida knew that when some piece of information was declared destroyed, it meant that she should keep looking for it.”

9 of 10

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.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.