by Richard Subber | Oct 31, 2022 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History
the navies were second priority…
Book review:
Under Two Flags:
The American Navy in the Civil War
by William M. Fowler Jr.
New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1990
352 pp.
I imagine most Civil War buffs will learn something by reading Under Two Flags.
Most standard histories don’t emphasize the naval elements of the Civil War fighting. Both Northern and Southern leaders thought the navies were important, and so they were.
Stephen Mallory, naval secretary of the Confederate States, had a job no one would have wanted in 1860. He came up short in most respects, because the Confederacy just couldn’t afford to build and maintain a potent navy.
Gideon Welles, his Northern counterpart, had only a somewhat easier job.
The naval commanders never managed to convince their respective commanders-in-chief that the navies were as vital as the armies in the Civil War conflict.
The sailors on both sides were brave men, but Fowler gives them second billing.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2022 All rights reserved.
Common Sense by Thomas Paine (comments)
it wasn’t strictly business, but…
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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 | Oct 29, 2022 | Reflections, Tidbits
Pop-Pop’s point of view…
Being the grandfather just fills up my point of view, and the horizon gets pulled in pretty darn close, too! My beautiful granddaughter, our first, is here with me and my beloved, Barb, who is now Gram. This is our first journey of exploration as overnight babysitters in tandem—my son and his beloved, the Mom, are enjoying an interlude of adult conversation in another state.
…and when I say “pretty darn close,” I mean pretty DARN close because Gram won’t countenance my occasional unheeding sailor talk and so I try not to utter the other “D” word, although why we call it sailor talk instead of soldier talk or airman talk I do not know, most of the soldiers I knew could swear like drunken sailors, you betcha…
Anyway, I also try to concentrate on NOT doing baby talk, I never talked baby talk to my son, I intend to model the most correct version of the King’s English with this little girl because I am very well aware that she is already learning language even if she isn’t saying anything intelligible yet. She IS talking, I just don’t know what she’s saying, and I guess she’s in the same boat. So, we both do the best we can in the circumstances, and we smile a lot…and I think she likes to hear singing, so I’m doing some of that too, and it’s OK if I can remember only the chorus of “On The Banks of the Wabash, Far Away,” and she doesn’t mind if I sing it several times in a row.
I think it’s quite refreshing that babies don’t judge, they simply observe, learn, and imitate (or not), it would be a nicer world if more people acted like babies more often…except for the doo-doo diaper part, I confess there’s no thrill in it for me, but as the Pop-Pop, I’m prepared to do my duty when this young lady does the doodie, but, well, you know…
I’ve done some reading about language and the fully-wired facility that all human babies have at birth to learn language, so I’m fascinated to listen to her verbalization at the age of 8 months, she clearly is NOT making sounds at random, and so I am sympathetically responding to her, saying “I know you’re talking but I don’t know what you’re saying yet.” I know she’s working hard on understanding what we say to her. I can’t wait for my first opportunity to listen to my sweet granddaughter and say: “I understand!”
Stay tuned…and if you’re already a grandparent, you know how this story turns out!
September 2, 2011
In case you were wondering: Paul Dresser published “Wabash” in 1897, and his wildly popular ballad was one of the earliest pieces of music to be recorded…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Banks_of_the_Wabash,_Far_Away
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Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2022 All rights reserved.
Movie review: Same Time, Next Year
all-American adultery, oh yeah…
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In other words: Poems for your eyes and ears with 64 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 | Oct 26, 2022 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Human Nature
he taught himself to read and write
Book review:
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass:
An American Slave
by Frederick Douglass
Benjamin Quarles, ed.
Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, written 1845, copyright 1960
163 pp.
Narrative is a devastatingly calm account of the life of Frederick Douglass as a slave and then a free man.
It’s very hard to read, let alone imagine the reality of the whippings that Douglass describes. It’s horrifying to recognize that some human beings brutalized other human beings with a whip.
Douglass taught himself to read and write.
He informs us about history that we don’t want to know, but must accept as true.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2022 All rights reserved.
Poets talk about poetry
…a red hot bucket of love…
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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 | Oct 24, 2022 | My poetry, Poetry
…interruption of the night.
Aurora
A sharp spark of dawn intrudes on the dark,
it limns the sentry line of trees
that mutely guard the wetlands,
it draws the eye but has no style,
is not sun, and scarcely bright,
yet augurs interruption of the night.
May 2, 2020
Published in Sep-Oct 2022 issue of Creative Inspirations
My poem “Aurora” was published in my fifth collection of 53 poems, My first name was rain: A dreamery of poems. You can buy it on Amazon (paperback and Kindle), or get it free in Kindle Unlimited (search for “Richard Carl Subber”).
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My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2022 All rights reserved.
“…fragmentary blue…”
a hue for you, thanks, Bob
Robert Frost, old reliable
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Writing Rainbows: Poems for Grown-Ups with 59 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”
Your comments are welcome—tell me what you’re thinking.
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by Richard Subber | Oct 23, 2022 | Book reviews, Books, History, World history
those tricksters…
Book review:
The Man Who Never Was
by Ewen Montagu
Philadelphia, PA: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1954
This is the original first-hand account of “Operation Mincemeat,” the classic World War II intelligence caper that duped Hitler and his military commanders into believing that the Allies would not attack Sicily in July 1943. You know how it all turned out: the Allies captured Sicily after extended combat with about 23,000 Allied casualties and about 165,000 German and Italian casualties.
Montagu led a small group of ingenious British planners who managed to put false documents on a corpse (“the man who never was”) that drifted ashore in southern Spain and gave the Germans every good reason to think that the phony invasion plans were real.
The true identity of the fictitious “Major William Martin” is not revealed in this book, and later there was some dispute about it. Montagu himself wrote that the real man who served his country in death was Glyndwr Michael, a homeless man from Wales.
The Man Who Never Was is a simply written account that reports the meticulous planning and the insightful intelligence assessments of how the Germans would react to the false documents planted on the corpse.
Montagu frankly expresses, seemingly in typical British unemotional remarks, how wildly happy he and his crew were that Operation Mincemeat was a spectacular success. Lots of Allied veterans who fought on Sicily, and their families, can be thankful for that.
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Book Review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2022 All rights reserved.
“Many waters cannot quench love.”
Love will rise to meet you…
(what you hear is poetry)
Book review: St. Ives
by Robert Louis Stevenson
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Writing Rainbows: Poems for Grown-Ups with 59 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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