by Richard Subber | Aug 23, 2025 | Theater and play reviews
a different kind of Tom Hanks film…
Movie review:
News of the World
2020
PG-13
118 minutes
It’s titled News of the World, but that’s really not what this see-it-again movie is all about.
This out-of-the-ordinary Tom Hanks film is about awakening, and affection cradled in a dirty crystal goblet, and a little girl with a deadpan face and a deadened life who learns to smile.
The story line: a grizzled Civil War veteran, Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd (Tom Hanks), takes time out from his traveling newspaper reading gig to escort a hapless 12-year-old German girl, Johanna (Helena Zengel), to her mostly uninterested distant relatives after she escapes from Kiowa captivity.
There’s no love affair, of course, but the old man/young girl affection starts to pile on, and they handle some adversity, and Johanna teaches Kidd some Kiowa words so they can talk, and Texas cowboy culture passes them by as they roll their raggedy wagon into the future.
Johanna learns a beaming smile as she learns to work with Kidd in his reading rambles, and they make a life. It’s a feel good ending.
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Movie review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Book review: Forced Founders
by Woody Holton
The so-called “Founding Fathers”
weren’t the only ones
who helped to shape our independence…
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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 | Aug 21, 2025 | My poetry, Poetry
words as ring with fire…
such as…
I write such words as may inspire,
and to what end?—you may inquire…
I choose such words as ring with fire,
you hear them as you will.
My words conspire to sound such joy,
such pleasure as may climb a hill
and sing such songs as linger still
on lips that kiss the tune.
I write such words that whisper true
and tell such tales of rhyme and flame,
that lovers will caress such words
and angels learn their name.
May 18, 2025
Rhyming inspired by “Lepanto” by Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936)
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My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Book review: Lafayette by Harlow Unger
He was a great man. Also rich and lucky.
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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 | Aug 19, 2025 | Book reviews, Books, History, Human Nature, World history
the not so “Dark Ages”
Book review:
The Bright Ages:
A New History of Medieval Europe
by Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry
New York: HarperCollins, 2021
Gabriele and Perry offer quite a few things you never knew about the so-called “Dark Ages.”
The Bright Ages lays out an alternative view: life went on after the “sack” of Rome in 410 CE.
Various regional rulers and peoples continued to call themselves Romans for hundreds of years.
There was some beauty in the “Dark Ages.”
Human frailties were in full force before, during, and after the “Dark Ages.”
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Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Financier
Theodore Dreiser’s villain…
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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 | Aug 17, 2025 | My poetry, Poetry
wonderment…
adoro
Angels we can never see,
my dearest one may be an angel…
does she weep when I fail my better nature?
does she sing in silence when I do a good thing?
does she touch me when I wonder?
does she hold me to her
when I need
to feel a warmth in my world?
December 8, 2024
inspired by “For the Heartbroken” by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, December 8, 2024, on her website
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My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Sea Runners
…it informs, it does not soar…
by Ivan Doig
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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 | Aug 14, 2025 | Book reviews, Books
mere talk of love
Book review:
Washington Square
by Henry James (1843-1916)
New York: Doric Books, 1950
214 pages
Washington Square was written in 1880, depicting high society life in New York City in the 1840s and 1850s
Washington Square is a shallow dive into the meaning and the eternities of love.
Henry James offers 214 pages of sometimes desultory talk about love, and a couple kisses, and a touch—not an embrace—or two, and Catherine and Morris talk at each other about their concepts of love, but there are no awakenings, and no whispers melting on lips, and no warm zephyrs that fill the emptied spaces.
After Catherine and Morris have grudged their final words, Morris stomps away with his hat jammed on, Catherine returns to her knitting, and the reader is abandoned, adrift, still waiting to be filled by demonstrations of dearest love.
Henry James is a wordsmith, no dispute about that. The reader learns endearing and vastly frightening elements of the characters of the alleged lovers, and her curiously and completely unlikeable father, and Mrs. Penniman, the aunt who won’t butt out.
Henry James chases a plot, but doesn’t get his net around one.
The story line, for my taste, never ceases to be a prelude. There is no rip and no snorting in the pretend climax, and no satisfaction in the ersatz denouement.
If you want to argue that this presumed love story never gets started, and doesn’t really end, you get no argument from me.
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Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
The Visible Hand:
The Managerial Revolution in American Business (book review)
no managers in olden times…
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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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