President David R. Anderson's Bookshelf
An English professor and lifelong reader, David R. Anderson '74 is rarely without
a book (or three) to read. Here's what is on his bookshelf today:
Haunted Ground Oles go on from our college to do many good things, including writing fine novels like this one by Erin Hart ’80. Greg Kneser, our esteemed dean of students at St. Olaf, shared this book with me, and I recommend it highly to you. Haunted Ground begins with a grisly discovery. A farmer digging peat in a bog in Ireland unearths the severed head of a young woman. Apparently, bogs have preservative powers, so the head could be hundreds of years old. The National Museum in Ireland has jurisdiction over such bog finds, and they dispatch Cormac Maguire, an archeologist at University College, Dublin, and Nora Gavin, a lecturer in anatomy at Trinity College Medical School, to investigate. To complicate matters, the bog in which the head was discovered sits at the nexus of a whole set of tensions, conflicts, and complications among neighboring residents, including an angry farmer with a complex family dynamic, a widower whose wife and son recently disappeared and who is a suspect in their disappearance, Detective Garrett Devaney who is not supposed to be investigating the disappearance of the wife and son but does so anyway, and more than a little sexual tension between Cormac and Nora. If it sounds to you as though there’s a lot going on in this novel, you’re right: there is. But Hart interweaves the narrative of the investigation into the severed head, the investigation into the disappearance of the wife and son, the issues of the angry farmer and his family, and the relationship between Nora and Cormac into one coherent story. The narratives become more closely connected as the novel progresses, until by the end pulling on one thread unravels them all. This is a novel about parents and their children, about husbands and wives, about lovers, about anger, and about forgiveness. If you are interested in Ireland and things Irish you will love this book for its powerful evocation of Irish musical traditions, its depiction of Irish landscapes, its portraits of the Irish, and its careful attention to Irish history. If you love rich and evocative prose, you will admire this novel’s bold eloquence. And if you love a narrative about how a crime gets solved, you will take pleasure in Detective Garrett Devaney’s unraveling of a modern crime and Cormac and Nora’s unraveling of an ancient one. |
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The Board Book: An Insider’s Guide for Directors and Trustees William G. Bowen, president emeritus of Princeton University and president emeritus of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is one of the country’s leading commentators on organizational governance. His service as a director on the boards of such for-profit companies as Merck and American Express and as a trustee on the boards of such nonprofits as the Smithsonian Institution and Denison University, has given him a synoptic view of the governance issues in both realms. In this new book, Bowen discusses the role of a board; weighs in on the debate about how to structure board leadership; reviews the hot-button issues of CEO compensation, evaluation, and transition; offers insights on how to build an effective board; and describes best practices for managing board affairs. Governance might sound like a dull subject to some readers, but in a post-Enron world it has become critical for organizations to attend to their governance structures and practices. Bowen’s book gets right at the key issues and discusses them incisively. It’s a good read. One of the most interesting aspects of this book for me is Bowen’s discussion of how different elements of governance play out differently in the for-profit and nonprofit sectors. For example, more and more for-profit companies are moving away from the model where the CEO also chairs the board of directors. Some companies have moved directly to the opposite model where a non-executive chairperson chairs the board, while others have transitioned to the “lead director” model. In the nonprofit world — and certainly in colleges and universities — the non-executive chairperson model has been in place for many years. In this respect, the nonprofit sector has been the leader in establishing a best practice in governance. On the other hand, as Bowen points out, the for-profit sector is far ahead of nonprofits in establishing clear performance metrics for the organization and its leadership and in making data-driven evaluations of performance. Bowen writes with great insight about the challenges to mission-driven organizations (a category which includes most nonprofits) in using performance metrics. Nonprofits pursue a “double bottom line”: they must not only show that they are deploying their resources in the most effective way but also that they are serving the mission of the organization. It is this second bottom line, the “return on mission,” that is challenging to measure and assess. Bowen cautions nonprofits not to lose sight of this second bottom line and “begin to evaluate themselves solely on the basis of financial results.” (p. 29) The issues addressed in this book are, obviously, important for a college president to consider. Working effectively with the Board of Regents to further the mission of the college is among the most important responsibilities of the president of St. Olaf. I found much in this book to help me with that work. This book would also be of benefit to any reader who serves on a for-profit or nonprofit board and would like to enhance either one’s own effectiveness as a board member or the effectiveness of the board. And it would be a great read for anyone considering joining a board. I recommend it. |
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