Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is a raw, touching, powerful and beautifully written semi-fictionalized account of the author’s time in Vietnam, a book in which the author and the narrator are entwined, and O’Brien intentionally makes it impossible to separate the two. He writes poignantly of getting his draft notice in the mail, of the men he served with, the dirty realities of war, and life after the war. More of a collection of related vignettes than a novel, The Things They Carried explores love and loss, courage and cowardice, friendship, morality and (most of all) truth. And although the centerpiece is the Vietnam War, it’s not about Vietnam per se; it’s about “getting at the truth when the truth isn’t sufficient for the truth” and understanding “why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.”

Hundreds of management theories have been espoused, but none has influenced me more than “Theory X/Theory Y” posited by Douglas McGregor, a Harvard educated social psychologist and President of Antioch College from 1948-1954. While earning my MBA, we covered this theory on the surface level. Managers who follow Theory X principles believe that people need to be controlled and directed, are self-centered and are not interested in the betterment of the organization. Managers who follow Theory Y principles believe that people enjoy taking responsibility for their work and will be creative and productive if given the resources to do so. Most of us do not fall on one side of the spectrum, but we likely have personality characteristics that lean toward one style over the other.

It wasn’t until I took my first class in my Ph.D. program, the History of Management Thought, that I could fully appreciate the simplicity and applicability of Theory X/Theory Y. One of our assignments was to select a book from a prescribed list and report on the theories presented in the context of the year the book was written. I selected The Human Side of Enterprise simply because it was written in the year I was born, 1960. At that time, the United States was experiencing a manufacturing boom and efficiency and economies of scale were high priorities. McGregor understood the need to take a deeper look at what motivates people and leads to success. He argued that an organization’s leadership is responsible for establishing a culture that creates conditions that encourage and enable individuals to take pride in their work, reap satisfaction from what they accomplish, and to feel appreciated.

McGregor was likely ahead of his time when he predicted that Theory Y environments, now so prevalent in today’s high-tech and nimble society, would become the norm rather than the exception. Thus, The Human Side of Enterprise has become a timeless classic that is just as influential today as when it was first written over 50 years ago.

The year is 1900. The setting is Galveston, Texas, a thriving city. Isaac Cline, the chief weatherman for Texas, is certain that Galveston is immune to any hurricane threat. But in September 1900 a massive hurricane proves him wrong and does so at great personal cost. The storm killed over 8,000 people (some argue that up to 10,000 perished) in Galveston alone, stole the city’s future, and caused hurricane experts to revise their thinking about how hurricanes kill.

Erik Larson is probably best known for Devil in the White City (2004), but five years earlier, Isaac’s Storm: a man, a time, and the deadliest hurricane in history was published. Using Isaac Cline’s own telegrams, letters, and reports, the testimony of scores of survivors, and our latest understanding of the science of hurricanes, he builds a chronicle of one man’s heroic struggle and fatal miscalculation in the face of a storm of unimaginable magnitude. It is a fascinating and captivating account of the deadliest hurricane in U.S. history and the man who could not have predicted it.

Reading this book was a game-changer for me in that it offers the opportunity for respite from an over-active mind. Mipham, an teacher in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, begins by asserting “Many of us are slaves to our minds. Our own mind is our worst enemy.” He goes on to show gently and thoughtfully how this is so, and how meditation can help unhook us from the excesses of the “wild-horse” mind, fed by ego and the Buddhist-identified common ills of greed, aversion, and delusion.

When I read this book, I had been practicing meditation off and on, mostly off. In particular, I had been influenced by James Finley’s Christian Meditation: Experiencing the Presence of God (2005), another wise book about cultivating stillness and peace. But Mipham’s presentation of “peaceful abiding” in meditation, whatever one’s religious orientation or lack thereof, resonated deeply. He offers much good material for “strengthening, calming, and stabilizing the mind” with chapters such as “How to Gather a Scattered Mind.”

Did the book lead me to meditate more? Yes, although not as frequently as I would wish. But, to paraphrase a popular Buddhist saying, it did help me to NOT believe everything my fervent, fearful, problem-solving, ego-protecting mind tells me and to live more meditatively, thankful for “how incredibly rare and precious human life is,” even–especially–in troubled times.