by Richard Subber | Dec 25, 2025 | American history, Book reviews, Books, Joys of reading, Language
“…I feel a goneness…”
Book review:
Golden Tales of New England
May Lamberton Becker, ed.
New York: Bonanza Books, 1931
378 pages
Writers used a different kind of language to create feel-good stories in the 19th century.
Golden Tales of New England is a feel-good sample of 17 of them.
You’ll recognize some of the authors: Hawthorne, Thoreau, Louisa Alcott, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Harriet Beecher Stowe…
The others might be new for you, as they are for me, like the offering of Rose Terry Cooke (1827-1892), “A Town Mouse and a Country Mouse.” It’s an authentic, ample exhibition of New England patois and sturdy New England character. Meet “Mandy” and “M’lindy,” two aging sisters who were born Amanda and Melinda, and who were fated to share their living, mostly at a distance but, in the end, so inescapably together.
Here’s Amanda sadly recounting her sister’s death: “I guess I’ve got through…[Melinda] went an’ married that old Parker, an’ then she up and died. I wish’t I’d ha’ stayed with her longer; mabbe she wouldn’t have died. She wa’n’t old; not nigh so old as I be…I feel a goneness that I never had ketch hold o’ me before…”
Hawthorne’s “Old Esther Dudley” is a dainty adoration of a venerable lady who never gave up being a Tory during the Revolutionary War, and persisted in being the almost ghostly guardian of Province House in Boston after the British departed.
The other Golden Tales are equally exotic morsels of what entertained the citizens of the Republic long before television and Twitter.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
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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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by Richard Subber | Dec 23, 2025 | My poetry, Poetry, Reflections
the birds we do not know
knowing
I know being
and I know anticipation
and I know expectation,
and nonetheless I know surprise
and I know remembrance
and I know fear
and I know wonder…
what is it that I do not know?
what remains to be not unknown?
…which slowly singing bird
will pick my window
for her morning melodies?
September 20, 2025
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My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Book review:
Moral Tribes by Joshua Greene
sincere, but off the mark…
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My first name was rain: A dreamery of poems with 52 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 | Dec 21, 2025 | American history, Book reviews, Books, Democracy, History, Politics, Power and inequality
“nationalism” is an obstacle
Book review:
This America: The Case for the Nation
by Jill Lepore
New York: Liveright Publishing Corp., 2019
150 pages
The United States has been a recognizable entity barely—barely—long enough to be a nation.
Today we barely acknowledge our American Indian heritages, which could be part of our nationhood if we thought about it once or twice.
Jill Lepore offers what she is so good at offering: a sensible and informed discussion of what “nation” means, and why “nationalism” is an obstacle to the good life, and why “liberalism” should be what we like to talk about.
Read This America to get her details. Read it and talk about it.
Of course, her book is a political discourse, but it is not rabidly partisan. It’s something to think about.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Old Friends (book review)
Tracy Kidder tells truth about old age…
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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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by Richard Subber | Dec 18, 2025 | Tidbits
ain’t it the truth…
“It does not require many words
to speak the truth.”
Chief Joseph or Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt (“Thunder rolling down the mountain”) (1840-1904)
Chief of the Wallowa of the Nez Perce (Niimiipu)
Let’s keep telling the truth about what’s going on in America.
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Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
A Farewell to Arms (book review)
classic Ernest Hemingway
with relentlessly realistic dialogue…
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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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by Richard Subber | Dec 16, 2025 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Language, Revolutionary War
what does “self-evident” mean?
Book review:
The Greatest Sentence Ever Written
by Walter Isaacson (b1952)
New York: Simon & Schuster, 2025
67 pages
First, let’s get this straight: it’s worth your time to read this little book.
Maybe you think you know all you want to know about the Declaration of Independence, but I think you’ll learn at least a couple things of interest as you read The Greatest Sentence Ever Written.
For starters, Thomas Jefferson did not “write” the Declaration. He more or less wrote the first draft, and then his committee—including Benjamin Franklin and John Adams—applied their pens, and then the Continental Congress had its final say.
Isaacson’s “greatest sentence” is the second sentence of the Declaration, beginning “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” The words of the sentence had specific meanings for educated men (no ladies in the Congress) with Enlightenment prejudices in the late 18th century, and the committee and Congress changed a number of the words in Jefferson’s draft. For example, Jefferson originally wrote “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable…”
Keep these “undeniable” circumstances in mind: in July 1776 no member of the Congress knew how the whole “revolution” thing would turn out, and the Declaration did not start the revolution: the shooting war had started more than a year earlier in Lexington and Concord.
Isaacson is a popular biographer, and this little book is a good example of his writing talents.
For a more in-depth treatment by a noted historian, try reading American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence by Pauline Maier.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2026 All rights reserved.
Book review: Grace Notes
Is it prose or poetry?
by Brian Doyle
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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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