by Richard Subber | Oct 31, 2023 | Book reviews, Books, Joys of reading, Language
sassy, salty, and singular
Book review:
The Kingdom of the Kid:
Growing Up In The Long-Lost Hamptons
by Geoff Gehman (b1958)
State University of New York Press, Albany, NY 2013
238 pages
I stepped outside my comfort zone to read Geoff Gehman’s memoir about some of his childhood years in the “long-lost Hamptons.” I’m glad I did.
If you have a particular point of view about memoirs, either for or against, try to forget it and pick up The Kingdom of the Kid, and just settle in for the ride.
This is more than a prosaic romp through childhood memories, it is a paean celebrating a child’s-eye-view of life.
Gehman is a writer who likes to “linger over words,” that’s my kind of writer. His prose, his stories, his memories…sassy, salty and singular.
Gehman is a poet, too. Repeatedly, he offers lush insight into his industrious youth, his friendships with the young and the old, his affinity for the place, the “long-lost Hamptons” where Geoff and his pals spent the good old days.
He describes the scene as he observed mourners in the Wainscott Cemetery:
“…I sat on my bike in the school parking lot, shaded by grand sycamores, and watched visitors treat the cemetery with reverence. They placed flowers by graves, prayed on their knees, cried on their backs. They stared at the sky, held séances in broad daylight, eavesdropped on eternity.
“Those pilgrims taught me the morality of mortality. Without asking anyone I learned to walk around the stones, to respect the dead as if they were alive.”
In every chapter he offers another little piece of his heart.
The Kingdom of the Kid is good reading. Real good.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Bridges of Madison County
If you’re looking for
highly stoked eroticism
and high-rolling lives
that throw off sparks when they touch,
look elsewhere.
by Robert Waller
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My first name was rain: A dreamery of poems with 53 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 21, 2023 | Language, My poetry, Poetry
loving a creature…
Learning
She was happily proud
to show me the new chicks,
her loving hands firmly full
of the downy creatures,
she taught me how
to gently stroke them,
my hand, suddenly,
it seemed too hard
for touching,
I stretched one finger
to the tiny heads,
I wondered how those peeps felt
in that tiny moment
of such awful risk
that they couldn’t imagine,
I wanted to whisper,
in gentling words,
that there is no danger
in her warm hands
or my careful caress.
May 18, 2023
“Learning: was inspired by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer’s “Springing” on May 17, 2023, on her website, click here
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My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
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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 always welcome—tell me what you’re thinking.
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by Richard Subber | Oct 19, 2023 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History
the first Army nurses…
Book review:
The Nurses: Episodes 1-16
by Janet M. Kovarik, 2017
The Nurses tells some of the other stories about the American Civil War. You probably know about Dorothea Dix, the courageous activist who became Superintendent of Army Nurses during the war.
The Nurses invites you to understand the lives and the spirit of the women who rushed to serve under her leadership. Emmelda Poole and Livinia Atwater are two marvelous women created in Kovarik’s imagination, but they are real enough.
The author writes pleasing stories about believable women who helped their fellow man in ways only women could have done in the middle of the 19th century. Women like Emmelda and Livinia offered to suffering soldiers the kind of loving care that the doctors and the surgeons couldn’t or wouldn’t provide.
If you’re a Civil War fan, dig in to The Nurses.
If you just like good storytelling and remarkably credible dialogue, dig in to The Nurses.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
Book review: Address Unknown
A friendship corrupted by Nazi hatred in WWII
by Kathrine Kressmann Taylor
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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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by Richard Subber | Oct 17, 2023 | My poetry, Poetry
sipping the quiet wine
All of you
I see with your eyes,
I touch with your fingers,
I hear all the laughing of our years,
I walk with your steps,
I sip quiet wine with your warm lips,
all of me loves all of you.
It’s so easy to remember.
May 8, 2023
My dearest one, I love you
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My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
Book review: The House by the Sea
be with May Sarton in her travels, in her mind…
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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 | Oct 15, 2023 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Politics, Power and inequality
the birth of “big business”
Book review:
The Essential Alfred Chandler:
Essays Toward a Historical Theory of Big Business
by Alfred D. Chandler Jr. (1918-2007)
Boston: The Harvard Business School Press, 1988
538 pages
Chandler offers a deep and dispassionate inquiry into the genesis of “big business” and the “big multinational corporation” in the latter part of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century.
There’s much of interest here, even for the casual student of history and the “non-business” types.
Much of the motivation and much of the opportunity for the development of what Chandler chooses to call the “modern business enterprise” was circumstantial and related to geography and the exigencies of human and animal labor.
The author chooses to avoid the legal/illegal, moral, and philosophical aspects of the rise of big business, and the vastly maldistributed benefits of the same.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
iambic pentameter, y’know?
da DUH, da DUH, and stuff…
“In search of”…my poem
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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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