by Richard Subber | Jun 29, 2020 | American history, History, Tidbits
“The Six Grandfathers”
It’s generally believed that Mt. Rushmore was an unremarkable pile of rock before the famous sculptures of presidents were done.
Gutzon Borglum and his son, Lincoln Borglum, did the work starting in 1927, and it was completed in 1941. The Borglums and their crews blasted more than 400,000 tons of stone off the face of the mountain in the Black Hills in Keystone, SD.
Here’s the unfamiliar back story: It wasn’t always called Mt. Rushmore (The granite bluff was named after Charles Rushmore, a wealthy New York lawyer, in 1885).
The Lakota Sioux name for the mountain had been “The Six Grandfathers” (Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe).
It’s too bad the federal government didn’t authorize carving their likenesses into the face of the bluff.
N.B. The image is of Mt. Rushmore in 1905.
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Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2020 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Snow Goose
…sensual drama, it’s eminently poetic…
by Paul Gallico
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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 | Jun 25, 2020 | Book reviews, Books, Joys of reading, Language
…relentlessly realistic dialogue…
(book review)
A Farewell to Arms
Ernest Miller Hemingway (1899-1961)
New York: The Modern Library, 1932.
It’s been a while since I read Hemingway.
A Farewell to Arms is a slow starter, and again I learned to pace myself without too much trouble. The action is restrained but steady, and again I realized gradually that a key element is the relentlessly realistic dialogue.
The American protagonist, Frederick Henry, is involved in every scene. The life of the book is his life. His recurring, desultory involvement in his own life and his role in the Italian Army in World War I is the backdrop of his elaborately recounted relationship with the nurse, Catherine Barkley.
A Farewell to Arms doesn’t really seem to be a war novel. On the other hand, except for brief interludes, the characters really don’t seem to be at peace. For Frederick Henry, it’s an ironic farewell.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2020 All rights reserved.
Book review: Seven Gothic Tales
by Isak Dinesen
lush and memorable stories…
–
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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