by Richard Subber | Dec 30, 2018 | Book reviews, Books, Poetry, Reviews of other poets
clunky is the word…
Book review:
The Cradle Place
by Thomas Lux (1946-2017)
New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004
61 pages
Some folks think Thomas Lux deserves to be a prize winner.
Not likely. He offers joyfully erratic, uncivil, and unimaginable poems.
Lux inclines to clunky excess in his descriptions. No spirits are born in The Cradle Place.
Although the jacket notes refer to “refreshing iconoclasms,” I couldn’t find any.
Mary Oliver doesn’t have to move over…
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2018 All rights reserved.
Thieves in the Night
A story of Israel…(book review)
by Arthur Koestler
click here
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Above all: Poems of dawn and more with 73 free verse poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Dec 19, 2018 | Book reviews, Books, History
Cleopatra: she was a taker…
Book review:
Cleopatra: A Life
by Stacy Schiff
New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2010
Schiff is a Pulitzer Prize winner
Cleopatra: A Life is a compelling, stunningly contextual biography. It makes sense of the canonical, jumbled, and inconsistent biographical accounts of ancient writers who didn’t know Cleopatra personally. In many ways, it’s more modern than ancient.
Cleopatra, apparently, was the richest person in the known Western world while she reigned as Cleopatra VII, the last Pharaoh of the Ptolemaic dynasty, and the last queen of Egypt.
As a ruler, she had her ups and downs, but during her ups, she was the most powerful ruler in that world.
Cleopatra was a goddess, a celebrity, a winning general, a political mastermind, a serial murderess, an utterly enchanting lover, a startlingly well-educated, knowledgeable, and curious mover and shaker…think of Isis, Madonna, Patton, Golda Meir, Lucrezia Borgia, Marie Curie, and Aphrodite combined in a Type A personality with more or less unlimited worldly power…
The political action in Cleopatra: A Life is, sad to say, is all too familiar….I want to emphasize the context that Schiff describes: entirely recognizable governmental and organizational failures/corruption were pervasive in Cleopatra’s Egypt, and they are easily described and understood in modern terms.
Venal bureaucrats “walked like an Egyptian” …
you wouldn’t have had to search too long or too hard in Alexandria circa 50 BC to find one. You say “no surprise”? Well, of course, no surprise.
The Egyptian empire governed by Cleopatra was notoriously and vastly bureaucratized, and possibly the most significant enabling factor was the rich productivity of the Nile delta, renewed (almost) annually by the life-giving flood of the Nile. At the time, this stupefying agricultural abundance fed not only Egypt but also Rome—this was one factor motivating the famous attentions of Caesar and Marc Antony to the affairs in Egypt, including Cleopatra.
The riches of Egypt created an almost failsafe environment for heedless waste and mismanagement without fatal consequences—and also corruption at a level that everyone with any say in the matter could easily tolerate. Cleopatra, and her siblings and forebears, in the Ptolemaic dynasty were divinely in charge, with no effective restraint except the occasional Roman legion or two, and Rome was easily bought off. There was more than enough booty to go around for all who could claim a share.
At the time, there were persistent royal proclamations urging the ideal “good official” to be “vigilant, upright, a beacon of goodwill.” These were perhaps well-intentioned but wholly ineffective. There was too much booty to be had and insufficient penalties for taking more than one’s decent share. And the people of Cleopatra’s Egypt? These were descendants of the people who perhaps willingly labored to build the pyramids, these were people who thought Cleopatra was a goddess, these were people who believed in the everlasting rectitude of the dynastic and religious hierarchies that manifestly benefited a tiny elite…why did the people embrace all of that?
Cleopatra: A Life is a good read…you might have to remind yourself from time to time that none of it was written by Gordon Gekko.
Click here for Gekko’s “greed is good” speech
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2018 All rights reserved.
Book review: The House by the Sea
May Sarton’s travels, in her mind…
click here
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Seeing far: Selected poems with 47 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Dec 1, 2018 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature
a miss on tactics,
a miss on strategy…
Book review:
Moral Tribes:
Emotion, Reason,
and the Gap
Between Us and Them
by Joshua Greene
New York, Penguin Press, 2013
422 pages
“This book is an attempt to understand morality from the ground up.” Greene’s sincere aim is a bit too breezy for me.
Reluctantly, I admit I don’t have time to read a book like Moral Tribes right now. I feel like I’m too busy sticking fingers into the terrifying political dike that is threatening to collapse in America, indeed, in the world.
I’m interested in learning more about Greene’s approach in Moral Tribes: “understanding the deep structure of moral problems as well as the differences between the problems that our brains were designed to solve and the distinctively modern problems we face today.”
I don’t have enough time or energy to indulge Greene’s apparently sincere efforts to develop “a practical philosophy that can help us solve our biggest problems.”
America’s problems—Americans’ problems—are all too clear and at least one part of the fix is all too clear: there are lots of folks who can live with and live for the hatred they feel, and they’re voting; there are lots of folks who are afraid of some of the kinds of people who are getting elected and exercising political power to the detriment of most Americans, and too many of these fearful folks aren’t voting.
I think a dominating element of a practical philosophy for America right now is “Get out the vote!”
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2018 All rights reserved.
A poem about the right thing
…and the lesser incarnation…
“Vanity”
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As with another eye: Poems of exactitude with 55 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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