“. . . of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.—Ecclesiastes 12:12

IN ORDER TO save my flesh from weariness, for years I have subscribed to the New York Times Book Review, which arrives by mail as irregularly as The Mirror is delivered to out-of-county subscribers. (The U.S. Postal Service can justly claim it does not discriminate in favor of the big ones.)

When I do get the Sunday section each week I can keep up with all the books I need to know about but don’t need to buy. The excellent reviews sometimes answer long-standing questions; that happened with the Aug. 2 Review.

I have long wondered why so much of Texas’ retail business has been taken over by two chains that started in Arkansas: Wal-Mart and Dillard’s.

I knew that in the 1950s the late Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton had gone from owning one Ben Franklin variety store in Newport, Ark., to five.

In pre-Wal-Mart years, Gilmer was served not only by a Ben Franklin store, but also Perry’s and Davenport’s variety stores in a vibrant courthouse square retail sector.

SO WHAT enabled Walton to surge ahead so powerfully that Wal-Mart became the largest private company in the world and those others disappeared?

Light was shed by two new books about Wal-Mart, reviewed by Robert Frank, a Cornell U. economist.

To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise by Bethany Moreton and The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business both offer “penetrating insights” into the chain’s success, Frank writes.

Offering significantly lower prices than the competition is one key. The chain has always boosted 18th century economist Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” belief in the success of unfettered free markets, and to that end has given millions of dollars to conservative think tanks.

BUT THERE IS a little-known angle that Ms. Moreton explores:

From the beginnings, Wal-Mart has offered a job track leading to well-paid positions as store managers and assistant managers. Other jobs offer only “an austere compensation package,” the review notes, adding that Wal-Mart spokesman point out that the chain receives scores of applications for every opening.

Writer Moreton argues it is no accident that Wal-Mart came out of the Ozarks, “a stronghold of fundamentalist Christianity that was one of the last regions of the American economy to shift from farming to other pursuits.”

Many women preferred Wal-Mart’s part-time jobs with flexible hours because they were still trying to help their husbands make a living on the farms, and they had children’s schedules to consider.

But that was just part of the Wal-Mart appeal.

Sam Walton was no fundamentalist, but a liberal Presbyterian, Ms. Moreton wrote. But he and his management colleagues recognized that there was an economic advantage to weaving “specific strands” of fundamentalist beliefs into their strategy.

THAT STRATEGY emphasized the concept of “servant leadership,” so that employees did not feel demeaned by the servitude their job demanded. Instead, as they were often reminded, they had been given a cherished opportunity to provide cheerful service to others.

In transforming servitude from a negative job characteristic into a positive one Wal-Mart management may have been doing a non-economic favor to employees.

Another book reviewed in the Aug. 2 Times section. On Kindness, by Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor, argues that you don’t have to be a Christian to benefit from setting free your innate kindness.

The writers contend that people are “fairly bursting” with real kindness, but they fear its unpredictable consequences — what might result when our own needs and desires are mingled with those of others.

“By walling ourselves off from our inner kindness, we end up skulking around, hoarding scraps from the lost magical kindness of childhood, terrified that our hatred is stronger than our love,” wrote the reviewer, Peter Stevenson.

CO-AUTHOR Phillips is a psychoanalyst who believes that people come to be analyzed not because they are more unhappy than they could bear, but because they are not as kind as they want to be.

A novel thought — but if true, folks in our immediate area are blessed indeed. “Servant leadership” is practiced in churches of many denominations in such a giving way that it radiates out into the whole community and into other helping organnizations of all kinds. And what a good thing that is.

As to why that other Arkansas company, Dillard’s, came to a dominant position in its retail sector, that’s another story that doesn’t do much to boost the egos of prideful Texans.

sgreene@tatertv.com