by Richard Subber | Feb 25, 2023 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, World history
engrossing, but not Larson’s best…
Book review:
Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania
by Erik Larson (b1954)
Crown Publishers, New York, 2015
430 pages
I’m a fan of Erik Larson, starting with The Devil in the White City. Dead Wake offers a similar reading experience in Larson’s “no frippery” prose, and with a consistent tension that makes it a page turner.
I confess that it’s hard to avoid the somewhat deadening spoiler in this story: from Page 1, we know how it’s going to end. Torpedoed by Germany’s U-20, the Lusitania went down in about 18 minutes. Larson’s approach is exclusively chronological; it’s not a bad thing, but I found myself almost thinking out loud—“let’s get on with it”—as I navigated through the certainly more than adequate number of anecdotal scenes involving the ill-fated passengers and their clothing/meals/flirtations/premonitions/self-assurances…
Full disclosure: to the end, I was rooting for passenger Theodate Pope to get some love in her life. On the other hand, I now know far more than I care to know about President Wilson’s mushy courting of Edith Galt (who became his second wife).
The thing is, Larson tells a great yarn here but he doesn’t invite the reader to grapple with it. It falls short of shattering, consequential drama. The sociable elements—the almost chatty context—of much of his tale seem to displace full engagement with the terror of the event, and the outcomes that it hastened.
Larson tries to invest this story with solemnity, respect, and understanding.
Dead Wake is a dutiful—indeed, engrossing—account, but it doesn’t quite rise to the occasion.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
Play review: A Doll’s House
Henrik Ibsen’s classic on abuse…
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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 | Feb 20, 2023 | Human Nature, Tidbits
wanderer…
“I am the highway
and a peregrine
and all the sails that ever went to sea.”
Prodigious words by Robert Kincaid, in The Bridges of Madison County (by Robert Waller, 1995, p. 153)
Francesca Johnson confessed that she was “overwhelmed by his sheer emotional and physical power,” and those words were his response.
A peregrine is a falcon, of course, and it also means foreigner, alien, rover, wanderer, migrant, stranger…
…but love is not a stranger in The Bridges of Madison County.
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Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Scarlet Letter
the beating hearts…by Nathaniel Hawthorne
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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 | Feb 19, 2023 | Human Nature, My poetry, Poetry
giving is all…
Santa’s helpers
Bows and ribbons all around,
we’re on the floor
wrapping in the dark hours,
and we unwrap our hearts
and share great gifts,
again and again.
December 25, 2022
Delightfully inspired by “Every Christmas Eve” by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, December 25, 2022, on her website, www.ahundredfallingveils.com
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My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
Book review: “Bartleby, the Scrivener”
Think about loneliness beyond understanding…
by Herman Melville
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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”
Your comments are welcome—tell me what you’re thinking.
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by Richard Subber | Feb 8, 2023 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Politics
the Battle of the Greasy Grass…
Book review:
Lakota America:
A New History of Indigenous Power
by Pekka Hämäläinen
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019
530 pages
It’s just fabulously interesting to learn more and more about the lives, the cultures, and the civilizations of the American Indians who were in quite a number of catbird seats in the continental United States until well into the 19th century.
Don’t forget that the Battle of the Little Bighorn—“Custer’s Last Stand”—known to Indian survivors as the Battle of the Greasy Grass—played out on June 25, 1876, more than a decade after the Civil War, in the same year that Alexander Graham Bell patented his telephone.
The Lakota, one of three major groups of the Sioux Indians, were dominant in the high plains west of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River. They became a culture on horseback, and they depended on the buffalo.
In Lakota America you’ll learn that the Lakota were not tyrants, and they were not masters of every moment and every cluster of people in their domain, but mostly they called the shots for a long time.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Comanche Empire
the other story of the American West…
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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”
Your comments are welcome—tell me what you’re thinking.
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by Richard Subber | Feb 5, 2023 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature, Power and inequality
it’s not about rational choices…
Book review:
What’s Wrong with Economics?
A Primer for the Perplexed
by Robert Jacob Alexander, Baron Skidelsky (b1939)
New Haven, CT: Yales University Press, 2020
223 pages
Skidelsky has written a powerfully convergent book about the origins and enduring nature of economics and the lamentably over-hyped concept of Homo economicus.
“Economic Man”—the human calculating machine that continuously, exclusively acts in the most rational way to achieve maximum value at minimum cost—exists only in the imaginations of economists who invented him to fit their equally fictitious models of human behavior and modern economic activity.
In a nutshell: “…the neoclassical model of rational behaviour based on fixed preferences, complete contracts, and ample relevant information is the wrong one.” (p. 90)
What’s Wrong with Economics? will help you understand what’s wrong with our current so-called capitalist system and the people, companies, and governments that it mostly benefits.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
The Reader (Der Vorleser)
Not just a rehash of WWII…
by Bernhard Schlink
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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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