In 2012, Swedish writer Henning Mankell brought to a close his 12-book series on inspector Kurt Wallander. Actually, he concluded the series in 2009, but it took a couple more years to reach America. For that, Mankell used English academic Laurie Thompson, who translated three other books in the series, including the best one, “The White Lioness,” as well as about five other Mankell books. Thompson also translates the excellent Inspector Van Veeteren series from Hakan Nesser.

I had read about “The Troubled Man” well before it was published in April 2012 in America under the Vintage Black Lizard imprint (responsible for nearly all Mankell books). I had learned that this would be the final Wallander book, and that though Wallander wouldn’t die, it would be obvious why he couldn’t continue doing what he did. It became apparent very early in “The Troubled Man” what the issue would be, and Wallander struggles with it throughout the book even as he plods through his final case.

The case involves a retired naval officer who disappears, but only after a cryptic conversation with Wallander. The officer is the father-in-law of Wallander’s daughter, Linda, thus the connection. Wallander becomes embroiled, on his own time, in determining what happened to the man. There is a spy, Cold War theme.

The book moves along slowly, much more so than other Wallander books. But there’s a reason. A lot of things are happening, and they are happening with exceptional care under Mankell’s pen. This may be his most literate book, the most tenderly written, as he bids goodbye to his hero. There are references to earlier books, previous cases, including a final disposition of his long-distance Latvian soulmate, Baiba Leipa, which traces back to the second book, “The Dogs of Riga.”

Yes, it’s a slow book. The main plot doesn’t involve a whole lot of action. But I was entranced, finding myself clearly in the hands of a master writer who was intent on doing justice to the character he had created and nurtured so well. I didn’t care how slowly the story moved. I was soaking it all up.

The plot resolution was not unexpected, though it kept me guessing. However, the book continued well after the case was settled, as Mankell ties up loose ends in Wallander’s life. And the final paragraph, and especially the final sentence, close the story–close this life I’ve come to know so well–with dignity and grace. It was a totally, completely satisfying ending.

The Wallander books were among the first books I read in the Black Lizard imprint, which I’ve come to love. I’ve read 14 Mankell books now, including all 12 Wallander books. “The Troubled Man” was a milestone for me, the 150th Black Lizard book I’ve read. I saved this book for number 150, knowing it would be special. It seemed appropriate.

Stephen Covey, author of the megaseller “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” died today (July 16, 2012). He was an extraordinary person.

I read the book soon after it came out. It remains one of the best books I’ve ever read. Here are the seven habits:

1. Be proactive. Take the initiative in life, and take responsibility for your choices. Control your environment, rather than let it control you.

2. Begin with the end in mind. Know what you want to accomplish.

3. Put first things first. Do what is most important, not what is most urgent.

4. Think win-win. Look for solutions that benefit everyone, rather than solutions that have a distinct winner and loser.

5. Seek first to understand, then to be understood. Listen to the other person’s viewpoint; understand where they are coming from before stating your view.

6. Synergize. Let the strengths of various people combine to achieve something better than any one person could have accomplished. He calls it “creative cooperation.”

7. Sharpen the saw. Balance and renew yourself–mentally, physically, socially, and spiritually.

Those are all good principles. But the one I’ve found most enduring in my own life is Number 5, “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” I can be reactionary, responding quickly to something I don’t like. But Covey presents a much better path. A path I’ve tried to follow for over 20 years.

Stephen Covey

Largely as a result of learning this principle, I tend to assume the best about people, giving people the benefit of the doubt until I learn otherwise. For example, when I hear of decisions by local government that seem questionable, I step back and remind myself of these things:

1. Smart, competent people were involved in making these decisions (I give them the benefit of the doubt in being smart and competent).
2. Whatever objections I have, these people have already thought of and discussed at length.
3. I don’t have all the facts. They do.
4. Don’t criticize until you understand the facts.
5. Even then, ask yourself, “Is it really necessary to criticize? What’s to be gained from that?”
6. Remember: If I were in their shoes, I would want people to trust my judgment.

I take the same approach at work toward decisions made in local churches or at the denominational level.  And I take that attitude toward decisions made in my own church, Anchor. We have smart people with good intentions. They weighed all the pros and cons before acting. While their decision may not set right with me, I need to understand all the facts before criticizing them. In the meantime, I give them the benefit of the doubt–I don’t understand why they did what they did, but I assume it was the right thing. (Unless there’s a past pattern of poor judgment on their part. Example: Congress.)

And I take the same approach in my marriage. When Pam says something that strikes me as wrong, or when she proposes an idea that initally sounds like a bad idea, I try not to respond immediately. Instead, my first reaction is to give her the benefit of the doubt. I’ve trained myself to take a breath and remind myself:

1. Pam is very, very smart.
2. Pam mentioned it because she thought it was a good idea. She doesn’t suggest stupid things.
3. Pam has been thinking about this for a while. I just now heard it for the first time.
4. The idea probably has merit. I just need to understand it the way Pam does.

Then, rather than respond negatively or in a knee-jerk way, I ask questions or make comments to discuss and learn more. If it is, indeed, a bad idea, she’ll realize it without me needing to tell her.

At least, that’s how I WANT to respond to Pam. I don’t always. Pam will tell you that. I can be a jerk of the knee-jerk variety.

I do not, unfortunately, take the same approach on Facebook. On Facebook, I remain far too reactionary. So I’ve still got plenty to work on.

But regardless–thank you, Mr. Covey, for being one of those rare writers who have made a lasting impact on my life.

The Good Soldiers (2009) opens with this paragraph, and you immediately realize you’re in for a literary treat.

His soldiers weren’t yet calling him the Lost Kauz behind his back, not when this began. The soldiers of his who would be injured were still perfectly healthy, and the soldiers of his who would die were still perfectly alive. A soldier who was a favorite of his, and who was often described as a younger version of him, hadn’t yet written of the war in a letter to a friend, “I’ve had enough of this BS.” Another soldier, one of his best, hadn’t yet written in the journal he kept hidden, “I’ve lost all hope. I feel the end is near for me, very, very near.” Another hadn’t yet gotten angry enough to shoot a thirsty dog that was lapping up a puddle of human blood. Another, who at the end of all this would become the battalion’s most decorated soldier, hadn’t yet started dreaming about the people he had killed and wondering if God was going to ask him about the two who had been climbing a ladder. Another hadn’t yet started seeing himself shooting a man in the head, and then seeing the little girl who had just watched him shoot the man in the head, every time he shut his eyes. For that matter, his own dreams hadn’t started yet, either, at least the ones that he would remember, the one in which his wife and friends were in a cemetery, surrounding a hole into which he was suddenly falling; or the one in which everything around him was exploding and he was trying to fight back with no weapon and no ammunition other than a bucket of old bullets. Those dreams would be along soon enough. But in early April 2007, Ralph Kauzlarich, a US Army Lieutenant colonel who had led a battalion of some 800 soldiers into Baghdad as part of George W. Bush’s surge, was still finding a reason every day to say, “It’s all good.”

Isn’t that some amazing writing?

The Good Soldiers follows an army battalion during their 15-month stint in Baghdad, at the beginning of the surge. These soldiers were stationed in a bad neighborhood of Baghdad (was there a good one?), and under almost constant assault. Here’s a lot of military lingo to identify who exactly they were: 2nd Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment of the 4th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division, also known as the “2-16 Rangers.”

David Finkel, a Washington Post reporter, was embedded with this battalion in 2007. The year before, he won the Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles about a US effort to encourage democracy in Yemen. The Good Soldiers made just about everyone’s list of the best books of 2009.

The central character is Ralph Kauzlarich, the battalion commander. He’s a good guy, very competent, a veteran soldier. He knows what he’s doing, and is a real leader.

Before the tour was done, 14 soldiers had been killed, and we are privy to the details of every death. Many others–many–are wounded. We watch as numerous explosive devices ravage vehicles and maim the occupants. Legs and arms and hands are sheared off. This happens over and over and over, and we watch. It becomes excrutiatingly disturbing…which is Finkel’s point. This is what American soldiers dealt with constantly. We need to know. One soldier took a sniper’s bullet, but all of the other deaths came from explosive devices.

We come to understand counter-insurgency tactics, and how they worked and didn’t work. We see the frustrations of working with Iraqi leaders, while getting acquainted with some highly admirable and heroic Iraqis who risk their lives for Americans.

We follow David Petraus to Washington to be grilled by showboating Congressmen, and watch him deal admirably and calmly with the circus.

We follow Kauzlarich to San Antonio, to the amazing Brooke Army Medical Center. There, he meets with a number of his soldiers who are recuperating; most have lost at least one limb. One soldier had lost all four limbs. These are moving, troubling encounters. Again, it’s a product of war-waging which Finkel want readers to understand. But the hospital, with its Wounded Warriors program and its Center for the Intrepid, is also an inspiration. In dedicating the facility, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff stated, “There are those who speak about you who say, ‘He lost an arm. He lost a leg. She lost her sight.’ I object. You gave your arm. You gave your leg. You gave your sight. As gifts to your nation. That we might live in freedom. Thank you.”

Back in Iraq, we read in detail about the time two journalists, their cameras mistaken for weapons, and Iraqi civilians are attacked by a US Apache helicopter, an incident caught on tape and made scandalously famous. Eight men were killed. Finkel was there. His account is captivating.

I was halfway through the book before I realized something unusual Finkel was doing.

David Finkel

In War and Generation Kill, two other excellent books about the Iraq/Afghanistan wars, the authors did a great job of bringing soldiers to life. We were told what they looked like, their mannerisms, their childhood, their families, what they were doing before before entering the military–everything about them. Their ethnicity, obviously, was an important element in the character portrait–black? Hispanic? American Indian? Most reporters follow this approach. I would.

But Finkel didn’t. He never called attention to race or ethnicity. Never described someone as African American, or Hispanic, Asian. Never even called attention to class–if they came from a poor, middle class, or wealthy home. They were just soldiers. When he gave background information, it was race-neutral and class-neutral, able to apply to a white or black or Hispanic, rich or poor, southern or northern, urban or rural. Being a good reporter, Finkel knew everything there was to know about these soldiers. But while he was able to describe them as compelling individuals, he left race and class out of it.

This also applied to gender. He never identified a soldier as a woman. He didn’t write, “The doctor, a woman, applied a tourniquet….” No, he wouldn’t call attention to gender. He would just write, “The doctor applied a tourniquet, and then she….” You learned it was a woman only when he used a feminine pronoun.

To Finkel, everyone was just a soldier. A “good soldier.” It was a fascinating, and effective, choice.

In the very back of the book, I eventually discovered photos of the soldiers who were killed, all 14 of them. Photos of a few other soldiers were scattered throughout the book. Only then did I know ethnicity. And you know, it didn’t make any difference. They were just soldiers, doing their job and dying for their country, sometimes in horrible ways.

This was a remarkable book, as I had heard it was. There are many books by embedded reporters or officers which tell the story of individual units in Iraq or Afghanistan. I’ve read several–Joker One, War, Generation Kill–and they are all excellent. I don’t want to say The Good Soldiers is better than those books, because they are all well-written and engaging, and leave an emotional wallop. But there is, indeed, something special about The Good Soldiers.

After 244 years, Encyclopedia Britannica will no longer be published in a dead-tree edition. It’s going out of print. The company will continue publishing online and will do curriculum for schools. But the 32-volume 2010 edition is the last.

That’s sad. And yet, it’s a valid business decision. The company derives 85% of its revenue from school curriculum, and about 15% from subscriptions to the web site ($70 per year). The printed encyclopedias account for less than 1% of their revenue.

Today, the internet gives us instant access to the very latest information. Why go to a hardbound volume for an entry which may be out of date? For me, even if I had a set of Britannicas on the shelf, I would still go to Google first. For several reasons.

• I can probaby get the information faster.
• I can find multiple sources for the information I want.
• I can get multiple points of view, rather than just the point of view of the encylopedia author for that entry.
• I can make sure it’s the very latest information.

But as a kid, I sure loved encyclopedias.

At home, we had a set of the Book of Knowledge. I was buried in those books all the time, especially reading about various countries of the world. Later we got a World Book set, which was always my favorite encyclopedia. Very kid-friendly. I think World Book was preferred by the working class and middle class, while Britannica was a status symbol for the upper classes.

I never much liked Britannica. In elementary school, we usually had several different sets of encyclopedias in our classroom. But I rarely consulted Britannica. It always seemed too big, too serious, and the individual volumes were much heavier than with other encyclopedias. Then, when they divided the set into the Micropaedia (12 volumes of short articles) and the Macropaedia (17 volumes of in-depth articles), they totally lost me. How was I supposed to know whether I wanted the Micropaedia or the Macropaedia? So I stuck even more closely to my favored World Book.

Back in the 1980s, a Britannica salesman came to my apartment. He made a good pitch. But when I mentioned off-hand that I grew up on World Book, he began criticizing it, pointing out entries that Britannica had but which weren’t covered in World Book. He lost me right there. He might as well have been criticizing Mom’s pumpkin pie.

I recall the names of some other encyclopedias. Compton’s. Collier’s. Americana. Funk & Wagnalls. Wonder if any of them are still in print.

As I recall my formative years, engrossed in a volume of the Book of Knowledge or World Book, I’m saddened that today’s children won’t experience the same thing. You don’t “page through” Wikipedia. And crowdsourcing, which has built Wikipedia, certainly lacks the accuracy and intellectual vigor of the big encyclopedias. But it looks like Wikipedia is the future. No more little kids, like me, pulling the S volume off the shelf and spending hours leafing through it, absorbing information. A human sponge I was.

I see that you can still buy the 2010 edition of Britannica for $1400. In 1990, Britannica sold 120,000 sets in the United States. But they printed only 12,000 copies of the 2010 edition, and have sold only 8,000 sets. The remaining 4,000 sit in a warehouse, awaiting buyers.

Britannica boasts 65,000 articles from 4000+ contributors. Wikipedia has over 350,000 full articles, and hundreds of thousands of other entries, with over 100,000 regular contributors. And Wikipedia is entirely free. Of course, many Wikipedia articles deal with silly stuff from pop culture, whereas Britannica sticks to important stuff. But still, most anything you want to know, Wikipedia can tell you. I consult it several times a week.

Crowdsourcing attracts some true experts, but it also attracts common idiots like me. I have contributed to various Wikipedia articles related to the United Brethren church (just part of my job as Communications Director). Wikipedia is generally trustworthy, but certainly not authoritative. And yet, anymore ,it’s pretty much the best we got.

Another thing: encyclopedias look great on your bookshelf. Wikipedia can’t duplicate that. And nothing ever looked more classy than a set of Britannicas.