Book review: Who Built America?

Book review: Who Built America?

…men who brought

    their own shovels to work…

 

 

Book review:

Who Built America?

Working People

   and the Nation’s Economy,

   Politics, Culture, and Society,

   Vol. 1 To 1877

 

by Christopher Clark and Nancy A. Hewitt

New York: Worth Publishers, 2000

721 pages, with a substantial Appendix and index

 

Who Built America? is a comprehensive, widely sourced reference work that tackles the story of the actual building of America and our cities, commerce/industries, and infrastructures.

Clark and Hewitt give full respect to the groups of people who labored to do so: native Americans, women and children, minorities, and immigrants are fully credited.

I think that a useful feature is the summary chronology and suggested complementary readings at the end of each chapter.

Who Built America? is a go-to reference for any serious student of American history.

Volume 2, covering the Reconstruction through the end of the 20th century, is an equally appealing component of this series published by the American Social History Project, City University of New York.

This 2000 edition of Who Built America? was written by Christopher Clark and Nancy A. Hewitt, based on the original edition written by Levine, Brier, Brundage, Countryman, Fennel, and Rediker.

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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2018 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…

click here

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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A quote from General Custer

A quote from General Custer

…big talker

 

 

“There are not enough Indians

  in the world

  to defeat the Seventh Cavalry.”

 

General George Armstrong Custer  (1839-1876)

 

 

OK, let’s walk that one back a bit…

It wasn’t the quotation that got Custer in trouble.

Let’s talk about the Lakota and Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors—roughly 1,836 of them—at the Little Bighorn River in Montana on June 25, 1876…

Custer may have skipped a couple lectures at West Point, where he graduated at the bottom of his class (the “goat”) in 1861…he amassed 726 demerits, close to the school record.

No one cared about his West Point demerits at the Battle of Greasy Grass.

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Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2018 All rights reserved.

 

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”

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Book review: Seven Gothic Tales

Book review: Seven Gothic Tales

They’re not flamboyant,

     but they are fabulous…

 

 

Book review:

Seven Gothic Tales

 

by Isak Dinesen (1885-1962)

Dorothy Canfield, Introduction

New York: Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, Inc., 1934

420 pages

 

 

Isak Dinesen’s story doesn’t stop with Out of Africa. For starters, Isak Dinesen isn’t her name, but you probably know that.

Baroness Karen Christenze von Blixen-Finecke (née Dinesen) was a Danish author who wrote using several pen names, notably Isak Dinesen.

Her oeuvre is lush and memorable. Out of Africa is a compelling classic tale of life and love. Who wouldn’t love Denys Finch Hatton? After you’ve read Babette’s Feast, you don’t have any trouble recalling what it’s about. The films by the same names are authentic delights.

Seven Gothic Tales isn’t flamboyant, but it is fabulous. If you’re a writer, you may feel—a lot, or a little—that you wish you could write like Isak Dinesen. If you’re not a writer, you could wish that you may be one in another life.

Her muse is fertile and friendly—she manages, on page after page, to write what Coleridge identified as “the best words.” The storytelling is warm, the characters are vivid and realistic, and the context is so desirable.

Two of my favorite Gothic tales are “The Old Chevalier” and “The Poet.” The narrator in “The Old Chevalier” mentions, with approval, “I…do not think that I could ever really love a woman who had not, at some time or other, been up on a broomstick.” In “The Old Poet,” one of the characters is “the Councilor,” who “maintained an idea of paradise, for his generation had been brought up on the thought of life everlasting, and the idea of immortality came naturally to him.”

Isak Dinesen writes with casual skill to create worlds in which humanity thrives, and she fills Seven Gothic Tales with civilized entertainment.  

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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2018 All rights reserved.

 

Forget about Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Dracula is a scary book, really…

by Bram Stoker

click here

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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Book review: John Eliot: The Man Who Loved The Indians

Book review: John Eliot: The Man Who Loved The Indians

…a conversational biography…

 

 

Book review:

John Eliot:

The Man Who Loved The Indians

 

by Carleton Beals

New York: Julian Messner, Inc., 1957

192 pages

 

This is an entertaining biography of the Puritan minister who was known during his lifetime (1604-1690) as the “Apostle to the Indians.” Rev. John Eliot was the colonial leader who was most influential in cooperating with Indian leaders to establish the “Praying Indian” towns in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Beals creates a fictionalized biography of convenient length. The narrative is filled with dialogue that is relevant to the story, but is, of course, completely inauthentic in the sense that there is only a fragmentary record of Eliot’s conversations with his fellow colonials and with American Indians. This isn’t a big deal. However, Beals’ conversational tone is not to my taste for serious biographical treatments.

John Eliot: The Man Who Loved The Indians is based on substantial research and offers a bibliography of 46 sources, including many that are well respected and well known to historians and students of the colonial period. There is a useful index.

Beals offers an appealing, if one-sided, complement to serious investigation of cultural and political dynamics in 17th century New England.

Caveat: Beals, without apology, writes his story using the European context. To be sure, Waban and the other Indians are characters in the story.

Beals doesn’t spend a lot of time on the brutality of their demise.

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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2018 All rights reserved.

 

Book review: The Reader (Der Vorleser)

It’s more than a rehash of WWII…

by Bernhard Schlink

click here

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”

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Book review: Lord of the Flies

Book review: Lord of the Flies

Hedonism, barbarism, reality…

 

 

Book review:

Lord of the Flies

 

by William Golding (1911-1993)

Published 1954

 

It’s just possible that you’ve never heard of this book (or the 1963 movie). Try the book first. Its sustained drama shames the movie. Half of the movie is about boys in tattered clothing running through the forest—that’s not what Lord of the Flies is all about.

I dare to give this briefest possible summary: a transoceanic flight loaded with young British schoolboys crashes near an uninhabited island. The surviving boys (no adults) struggle to create and maintain a primitive civitas.

They fail. Their attempt at the simplest kind of self-government is wrecked by a cohort of boys who are persuaded by the charismatic, sociopathic Jack to indulge their inclinations to hedonism and barbarism. Ralph’s idealistic efforts to establish order are fruitless. Jack’s “hunters” end up killing two of their fellows before the grown-ups arrive to rescue them.

Golding’s Lord of the Flies pushes any defender of the common good to despair of “civilized” behavior that benefits all.

 

p.s. there are painfully disturbing similarities between Lord of the Flies and Shantung Compound: The Story of Men and Women Under Pressure (give this one a try, too).

NB. “Beelzebub” or “Baal-zebub” is translated “lord of the flies.”

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Book review: Hag-Seed

by Margaret Atwood…it ain’t Shakespeare

click here

 

Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2018 All rights reserved.

 

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”

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