by Richard Subber | Nov 25, 2022 | American history, Book reviews, Books, Democracy, History, Politics, Power and inequality
the many meanings of “shareholder value”…
Book review:
The Man Who Broke Capitalism:
How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland
and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—
and How to Undo His Legacy
by David Gelles
New York: Simon & Schuster, 2022
264 pages
Gelles has written a dreadfully important expose of the evolution of the disastrous idolatry of “maximizing shareholder value” and funneling more and more of America’s corporate wealth to the relatively small cadre of executives and directors and financiers who took advantage of it to line their own pockets and deny economic success to just about everyone else.
Of course, Gelles doesn’t say that Jack Welch was the only one who did it. For my taste, the title of the book is a distraction from the truth: America’s financial elite have misappropriated the industrial wealth of the country.
The Man Who Broke Capitalism concludes with a broadly detailed array of governmental policies that would remediate the disaster that Jack Welch and the Chicago school of economists and so many others created to be a substitute for the notion that a corporation is a creature of our society, and is best understood as a conduit for creating goods, creating wealth, and widely distributing both.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2022 All rights reserved.
Book review: Ethan Frome
it’s about not being satisfied with less…
by Edith Wharton
–
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 | Nov 21, 2022 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Politics
Essential, readable, provocative…
Book review:
Major Problems in the Civil War and Reconstruction
1st and 2nd editions
Michael Perman, ed.
1st Edition: Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath and Company, 1991, 598 pp.
2nd Edition: Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998, 460 pp.
Major Problems in the Civil War and Reconstruction is a tantalizing collection of contemporary documents and complementary essays by modern writers.
Perman has assembled “essential, readable, and provocative” commentaries on the catastrophes of the Civil War and Reconstruction in the middle of the 19th century.
Maybe you know a lot about that time and those events. You’ll learn more from this commendably interesting and surprisingly insightful book.
Take the time to read both editions of Major Problems—both editions are equally valuable, with almost wholly different selections.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2022 All rights reserved.
Book review: Shawshank Redemption
It’s a world I do not want to know…
by Stephen King
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many waters: more poems with 53 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 | Nov 12, 2022 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature
you don’t have many close friends…
Book review:
Friends: Understanding the Power
of our Most Important Relationships
by Robin Dunbar
London: Little, Brown, 2021
424 pages
This is a great book.
Robin Dunbar fans will recognize his deeply informed, very readable prose, and his comfortable and spectacular familiarity with quite a number of well-researched points of view.
Friends will confirm what you already know, on some level: friends and close family members are essential in your personal and social life, and you don’t have very many of them.
Typically, a person has five close friends/family members with whom she can share anything and everything, as often as possible. These five intimates are part of the circle of about 15 “best friends” who are nurtured and enjoyed in the greater part of the time you spend socializing, that is, being with and being in contact with other people.
Impersonal contact via social media is not a substitute for actually spending time with your friends. (By the way, nobody has 897 “friends” on Faceboook or SnapChat—if you think you do, try calling them and getting them to meet you for coffee or anything else to drink.)
Staying in touch with friends is especially important for old-timers. You can literally live longer if you maintain some active friendships.
The basic thing about friendship is trust: you know the other person well enough to understand how he thinks, and you trust him to act accordingly, and you know you can ask him for help if you need it.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2022 All rights reserved.
Book review:
Moral Tribes by Joshua Greene
sincere, but off the mark…
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Above all: Poems of dawn and more with 74 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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