George C Marshall or Life and Words

George C. Marshall: The Rubrics of Leadership

Author: Seward W Husted

There have been more biographies of George C. Marshall than any other Army Chief of Staff or Secretary of Defense and almost any Secretary of State. This is not another one. Stewart Husted recognizes that, for Marshall, leadership was a verb, not a noun, and this book conjugates it. It is a leadership book bereft of most academic jargon--no collaborative synergisms, no Type A, B, or even C, no Theory X or Y, nothing approaching charismatic, not even a paradigm, shifting or not shifting. The Marshall Library, Bland's Papers, Pogue's Marshall, and nearly 100 other sources have been carefully plumbed to extract and glean Marshall leading, Marshall talking about leading, and Marshall teaching leadership. Only the biography and history is repeated as are necessary to putting the leadership issue in context. And the context is as current as tonight's CNN or Fox News--preparation for war, diversity, the United Nations, negotiating with France, disloyal generals, overreaching politicians, dealing with Russia and China. In this milieu, it should be noted that this is a book about democratic (small "D") leadership.

About the Author:
Stewart W. Husted is a retired U.S. Army Reserve Lieutenant Colonel who has taught leadership at both the MBA and undergraduate levels.

Table of Contents:

Dedication     v
Acknowledgments     vii
Foreword   General J. H. Binford Peay, III     xi
Prologue   General Colin Powell     xiii
Author's Note     xv
Building a Solid Foundation     1
A Leader of Character     15
The U.S. Army: A Learning Organization     35
Managing and Planning the Impossible     53
Building a Winning Team     33
Building and Maintaining Morale     89
Communications     103
Turning Crisis into Success     125
Conflict Resolution and Negotiation     147
A Life of Selfless Service     169
Civil-Military Relations     183
Chronological Order of George Marshall's Professional Career, 1902-1951     235
Marshall Plan Speech: Harvard University, June 4, 1947, version     237
Bibliography     243
Index     247
Author's Biography     261

Book review: Men Who Knit The Dogs Who Love Them or The Complete Book of Sports Nutrition

Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary

Author: Veena Das

In this powerful, compassionate work, one of anthropology's most distinguished ethnographers weaves together rich fieldwork with a compelling critical analysis in a book that will surely make a signal contribution to contemporary thinking about violence and how it affects everyday life. Veena Das examines case studies including the extreme violence of the Partition of India in 1947 and the massacre of Sikhs in 1984 after the assassination of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. In a major departure from much anthropological inquiry, Das asks how this violence has entered "the recesses of the ordinary" instead of viewing it as an interruption of life to which we simply bear witness. Das engages with anthropological work on collective violence, rumor, sectarian conflict, new kinship, and state and bureaucracy as she embarks on a wide-ranging exploration of the relations among violence, gender, and subjectivity. Weaving anthropological and philosophical reflections on the ordinary into her analysis, Das points toward a new way of interpreting violence in societies and cultures around the globe. The book will be indispensable reading across disciplinary boundaries as we strive to better understand violence, especially as it is perpetrated against women.