Service memoirs, if well-written, are perennial draws. They bulge with ‘inside’ stories, they are written by men who have been at the top, privy to intrigue and decision, and they also seem to termi¬nate the service man’s code of silence. The memoirs often, contain analysis and opinion that comes easier with hind¬sight. There has, therefore, been a number of such memoirs recently, mostly writ¬ten by ex-Army men.
Marion Woolfson, a journalist, has ploughed through mountains of docu¬ments to show that Zionists will stoop to any depth in order to populate Eretz Israel, their land of destiny. They will kill, torture, lie, and bomb, as long as Jews flock to Israel. They will also spread misinformation, terro¬rize innocent civilians, alter facts of history and send letter bombs to blast scientists work¬ing for their enemies.
Basic to the concept of growing talent are the effec¬tiveness standards associated with every managerial job. Indeed, effectiveness is not a quality that a manager brings to a situation. It is something he produces from a given situation. What matters is not what a manager does but what he achieves. Interestingly enough, even if both input and output are low, a manager could easily be hundred per cent efficient but zero per cent effective.
Culture and Morality is a collection of essays written in honour of Christoph von Furer Haimendorf. Its arrival into the world of books should be sincerely welcomed by stu¬dents and scholars of anthro¬pology. The introduction gives us a detailed account of Haimendorf’s career and it includes references to his pub¬lished works. Contributors to this book have focussed on the theme of morality dealt with by Haimendorf in Morals and Merit (1967).
This study of religion and society in Thailand focusses on the Hindu cultural in-fluences that exist in Thailand. It is always interesting to see how the values, ideas and spirit of Indian society work after coming into contact with other cultures. Santosh Desai identifies and studies how the Indian values and customs have been transformed in their passage from one cultural region to another and how they have been assimilated into a different society.
The late Professor Moham¬mad Habib’s writings com¬prise all that was best in the work of a whole brilliant generation of Indian his¬torians. The thinking of this generation had been moulded by the concluding phase of India’s struggle for indepen¬dence—a phase that inspired a great deal of idealism, raised the moral stature of men and created fellow-feeling even in the midst of tensions and con¬flicts of truly continental dimensions. It is this essential humanism that makes many of the historical works of the late 1920’s down to the first decade of India’s independence valuable.