Foot and Fire

  The Ethical Executive (Becoming aware of the root causes of unethical behavior: 45 Psychological traps every one of us falls prey to) 2008, Stanford University Press By Robert Hoyk and Paul Hersey I believe, all leaders and decision-makers of a country should read this book. I have read this book years ago and sometimes after I became a public servant. This has been in my mind for a long time already given our social and political realities these days. One lingering question I could not get off my mind after I read this book was when it asked and answered: Why many good people became instruments of the holocaust? This book offered the root causes of unethical behaviors so we can recognize and avoid traps leading to them.      This book has scientific approach, not just some philosophical, religious or business sense to ethics. One has to read the thin book of 118 pages only to understand, but let me run down the 45 traps so you can have a bird's ey...

The Dressmaker of Khair Khana Gayle Tzemach Lemmon Nonfiction, Harper, 2011 Paperback, 243 pages Khair Khana is in Afghanistan, a country known to me as war-torn and the place where Osama Bin Laden was killed. That is the macro picture. But this book gave me a micro shot of Afghanistan through the story of Kamil and her sisters. Fresh from reading a memoir called Reading Lolita in Tehran, I still have the full grasp on how women were treated when the Mujahideen (holy warriors) are running the Muslim country. Both events narrated in Reading Lolita and the times when the Dressmaker of Khair Khana was established happened in the 1990s and both stories were born out of the fact that women in these two Muslim country were suddenly limited in their clothing and space. This book chronicles the triumph of the human spirit in times of adversity, specifically that of a woman during the precarious times. When suddenly the times changed in Afhganistan, Kamila saw herself alone to ...