by Richard Subber | Jun 17, 2023 | History, Human Nature, Reflections, Theater and play reviews
…a perfection of evil…
Movie review:
Conspiracy
The Wannsee Conference in Hitler’s Germany, January 1942
Starring Kenneth Branagh, Stanley Tucci, Colin Firth (2001)
Here’s the short version: watching Conspiracy is like drinking molten lead.
Conspiracy is an almost flawless portrayal of naked evil being done by powerful men, each of whom has lost or abandoned his moral compass.
It is dry, withering, completely transparent, all too believable—not merely because we know it’s all true. We know that there are powerful men and women alive today who are willing to do blasphemously wrong things like killing 6 million Jews.
Conspiracy dramatizes the Wannsee Conference that first officially articulated the Final Solution for the Jews of Europe: the Holocaust.
Stanley Tucci as SS Major Adolph Eichmann, Kenneth Branagh as Hitler’s Chief of Security Reinhard Heydrich, Colin Firth as Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart (a lawyer who wrote the racist Nuremberg Laws), and 12 others show how it was probably done—almost without passion—around a long conference table in a manor house outside Berlin. One of the participants failed to destroy his copy of the minutes. This surviving document was used in the post-WWII Nuremberg Trials.
Conspiracy is frightening, horrifying, and disgusting. It is a perfection of the evil that men can do.
The antidote for watching it is simple: do a good thing every day.
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Movie 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”
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by Richard Subber | Jun 15, 2023 | My poetry, Poetry, Reflections
I know there’s a place…
What I know
I’ll keep moving, I know I will.
I know I can’t remember how to go back.
I’ll keep looking for the place
I want to turn to,
I know that I can go on.
I know I can’t foresee
the final bend in this road.
I’ll keep asking how to get there.
I know there’s a place
where I can be happy,
I know I’ll find it.
I know I will.
June 25, 2019
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My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
Book review: Shawshank Redemption
A world I do not want to know…
by Stephen King
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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”
Your comments are welcome—tell me what you’re thinking.
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by Richard Subber | Jun 13, 2023 | American history, Books, History, Politics, Power and inequality
the men in gray went AWOL
Book review:
Bitterly Divided: The South’s Inner Civil War
by David Williams
New York: The New Press, 2008
310 pages
Wow! Bitterly Divided is a game-changing perspective on the causes and conduct of the American Civil War.
Read this compellingly researched book by David Williams to get the details.
Some highlights:
About a half million black and white Southerners served in the Union army, about 25% of the total number of men in arms wearing blue uniforms.
There was substantial opposition to secession in every state that seceded. Politicians and rich slaveholders literally corrupted the elections to make secession happen.
In the latter years of the war, at any given time as many as two-thirds of the common soldiers in the Confederate army were absent with or without leave. General Lee worried persistently about deserters.
The Confederate armed forces always had enough ammunition, but the soldiers and their wives and families at home never had enough food—because rich plantation owners insisted on planting the more profitable tobacco and cotton crops.
The Civil War was fought about slavery—because the big slaveholders refused to give up their source of free labor.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
Book review: “Bartleby, the Scrivener”
Here is loneliness beyond understanding…
by Herman Melville
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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 | Jun 8, 2023 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History
“Last call! Stage leaves in 10 minutes!”
Book review:
Stage Coach and Tavern Days
by Alice Morse Earle
New York: The Macmillan Company, 1900
Reissued by Singing Tree Press, Detroit, MI
449 pages
Old-fashioned, folksy prose. Stage Coach and Tavern Days is just dripping with details for the sincere history buff or historian.
Just in case you forgot, taking a ride in a stagecoach was a noisy, dusty, bone-thumping experience…and there was no onboard bathroom.
If you have a secret love affair with stage coaches, and taverns, and spirituous beverages in the 18th century, dive in.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Sea Runners
…it informs, it does not soar…
by Ivan Doig
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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 | May 30, 2023 | My poetry, Poetry
the trusting babe…
Near
…close enough to feel my thumb
in her searching grip,
close enough to share
her apple breath,
close enough to cradle
her weight across my arm,
and weep true love’s tears
as she suddenly sleeps
without a care…
August 27, 2021
I was walking around our kitchen, in early 2011, with my first granddaughter in my arms.
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My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
Book review: “The Gentle Boy”
Oh yes, the Puritans had a dark side…
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
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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 welcome—tell me what you’re thinking.
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