| ashu |
Posted
on 03-Jul-01 06:50 AM
This came via email in one of the newsletters I subscribe
to.
oohi
ashu
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Summer Leadership Reading
How do leaders grow into their roles—and keep growing?
In HBS professor Joseph L. Badaracco Jr.'s course The Moral Leader, MBA students learn to think more deeply about the complexities of leadership by reading works of literature, from contemporary fiction to classic moral philosophy.
The following is an abbreviated version of a list of extra readings that Badaracco suggests to students taking his course.
Louis Auchincloss, The Rector of Justin
"A fascinating portrait of the life and work of the founder of a New England prep school—a story of entrepreneurship, idealism, shrewdness, and pragmatism."
Robert Brawer, Fictions of Business
"Thoughtful essays, by a former CEO and English professor, on classic works of fiction and their implications for managers and employees of business."
Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
"A classic American detective story, first published in 1939, which can be read as a story about the pursuit of professional excellence and the moral dilemmas arising from dedicated service to a client."
Joseph Heller, Something Happened
"A black comedy, by the author of Catch-22, about success in corporate life and a fast-track executive adept at living on the surface of things."
Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible
"The story of the quiet and heroic leadership of a mother who takes her children to the Congo, following her missionary husband, and then leaves him and Africa and reassembles a life from the wreckage of these decisions."
Arthur Miller, All My Sons
"A family unravels the truth about a father's decisions at work and their full consequences."
William Shakespeare, Macbeth
"A study of ambition, the murkiness of values, and the powerful seduction of short cuts to success."
George Bernard Shaw, Major Barbara
"A witty, complex, surprising play about an arms manufacturer and his idealistic daughter."
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
"One of the great books, worth reading and rereading for a multitude of reasons, among which are Tolstoy's vivid and unforgettable portraits of men and women who change the world, on both the grand stage of life and in subtle, everyday ways."
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| akhilesh |
Posted
on 03-Jul-01 09:00 AM
Hey Namita and Ashu:
Thanks for the book postings.
I read Tolstoy during perhaps the most leisurely period of my life, in the mid-80s, when I had just completed my I.Sc., decided that I wasn't quite suited for medicine, and taking stock of my priorities as a whole (much to the chagrin of my family members).
While both War & Peace and Anna Karenina (forgive me my spelling) were captivating for the sheer scope of fiction, it was Dostovesky who drove me nuts. Is it "Idiot" where the book opens with the protagonist travelling in train from Vladivastok to Moscow? I would repeatedly look at the world atlas and marvel at the vast Russian landscape - Siberia, Central Asia, Europe. What it is like to be a Russian? They spoke a language that was very different from mine, and moved around places I had never travelled, and yet there was something strangely familiar...
My summer reading:
1. Guerrillas - V.S. Naipaul (House for Mr. Biswas is one of my alltime favorites. My fascination for the Caribbean Hindus drove me last semester to choose Indo-Caribbean community as my "international beat" (as a student of journalism in New York).
I have picked up an old and battered copy of G. for my subway reading. It's a tiny book and doesn't quite disturb the harmony of my little bag.
2. The Cancer Ward - Solzhenitsyn
3. The Twentieth Century - Howard Zinn. Never read him before.
Any thoughts on either Zinn, Naipaul, or Russian writers?
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| sally |
Posted
on 03-Jul-01 09:42 AM
Re: Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible
Great book. Really shallow and rather off-base description from the newsletter, though.
"The story of the quiet and heroic leadership of a mother who takes her children to the Congo, following her missionary husband, and then leaves him and Africa and reassembles a life from the wreckage of these decisions."
I'm not sure this blurb writer read the book ... the mother and her children each tell the story of their time in Africa from their own perspective (not so much "Rashomon" as "Joy Luck Club" style.) One of them is telling the story after her own death (a la "Sunset Boulevard").
One very interesting thing is the book's take on the Third World. Kingsolver uses various devices to make sure that her characters are cut off from Western privilege and forced to experience a Third World life from the inside. A character who married an African man is especially intriguing in this regard (to me, anyway.) She lives in the Congo without the cushion of expat privilege ...
This is also a book that made me cry, and if a book can do that, it's REALLY working ... though I'm not sure I'd want to re-read it right now!
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