by Richard Subber | Jul 9, 2026 | Books, Politics, Power and inequality
the right way to get down to business…
Book review:
Managing in the Next Society
by Peter F. Drucker (1909-2005), management guru
New York: Truman Talley Books, St. Martin’s Press, 2002
I love reading Drucker.
He is a deliberately perceptive and honest observer of management and the corporate world.
It’s too bad he’s not alive today to take a good look at men and women of business, and their businesses.
Drucker had many compelling insights about how to manage people and operations in a world that he assumed, de facto, was mostly populated by people who mostly want to do the right thing.
Too bad that’s not the world we live in.
Reading Drucker is an afternoon delight—that’s about how long it lasts.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2026 All rights reserved.
84, Charing Cross Road (book review)
Helene Hanff, on reading good books…
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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 | Jul 4, 2026 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Poetry
the new railroads carried books west…
Book review:
Literary Publishing in America: 1790-1850
by William Charvat
Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959
William Charvat offers, probably, more appealing detail than you ever imagined about American novels, short stories, and poems around the turn of the 19th century.
Writing was then, as it is now, a tough business for writers and publishers. Literary Publishing in America confirms that most writers didn’t get rich, and more than a few publishers managed to turn a really good buck.
In America, the market-expanding extension of railroads westward from the east coast had a lot to do with publishing success and the evolution of American reading taste.
Hint: the inland readers largely went for the romance-based novels, trashy and otherwise.
Hint: poetry has always been a tough slog for poets—ain’t much money in it.
Hint: history, and a historical context, were significantly important in the formation of the reading public’s taste for fiction.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2026 All rights reserved.
The Collected Poems of Sara Teasdale…book review
Literate, but impersonal
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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 | Jul 2, 2026 | Joys of reading, My poetry, Poetry
try again
hot
The star of day,
it sears the sky,
it turns away
my faltering eye,
yet it compels another try,
I know of course it cannot stay,
it fades so soon in climbing high.
April 12, 2026
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My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2026 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Comanche Empire
the other story of the American West…
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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”
Your comments are welcome—tell me what you’re thinking.
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by Richard Subber | Jun 23, 2026 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History
upright folks made the start
Book review:
One Small Candle
by Thomas J. Fleming (1927-2017)
New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1964
222 pages
Wow! One Small Candle is a satisfyingly readable, confidently written, fully researched book about the terrifyingly precarious lives of the Mayflower crew and passengers in 1620. You didn’t want to be there. So many of them died at sea or too soon after they landed at Plymouth Bay.
Fleming just tells it like it was. For long times, they had too little food and drink, couldn’t wash, couldn’t change their clothes , and watched their sick family members and friends die because nothing could be done to help them.
Think about living for weeks in a small house with unthinkably low ceilings and no bathrooms and 100 other people. Even if you like the other people, that ain’t fun.
I don’t want to gloss over this part: Fleming makes the common mistake of calling the native inhabitants “savages.” They weren’t “savages.” They weren’t Europeans, of course. They were among millions who lived in and civilized North America for thousands of years before the Europeans “discovered” it.
They Mayflower passengers were an upright mix of dedicated religious folk and mostly hearty adventurers. Many of them gave their lives in their quest to build new lives at Plymouth. They struggled mightily to light one small candle, and sometimes they happily sang around the candle. Their candle burns still, and we have to be careful that we don’t snuff it out.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2026 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Sea Runners
…it informs, it does not soar…
by Ivan Doig
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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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by Richard Subber | Jun 18, 2026 | American history, Book reviews, Books, Democracy, History, Politics, Revolutionary War
the so-called “Founding Fathers” feared chaos
Book review:
The American Revolution: A History
by Gordon S. Wood, New York: A Modern Library Chronicles Book/The Modern Library, c2002 repr. 2003
190 pages
American Revolution is well worth a read, especially if you think the average bear knows less than you know about the Revolutionary period.
For example, Wood suggests that the strong federal Constitution adopted in 1788 was a direct consequence of the “factious and tyrannical” majorities of voters who, in the 1780s, filled their bumbling, politicized state legislatures with ambitious local spokesmen for special interests. The framers of the Constitution saw a chaos of “elective despotism,” with “a spirit of locality” destroying “the aggregate interests of the community.”
That problem hasn’t been solved yet.
I’m going to keep reading more of Gordon Wood’s books, and I guess I’m going to get used to telling myself to keep reading each of them every time I get to a place that makes me think I want to stop.
For me, I think it’s mostly an issue of Wood’s style and not his acumen, knowledge, or scholarship. He slips occasionally into what I guess I’ll call his casual mode, using somewhat colloquial language, simplified (I resist saying simplistic) characterizations, and dismissive descriptions. Maybe I need to suspect that Wood’s editor needs a couple wake-up calls.
It’s such a relief to get past those clunky segments. For example, in discussing the religious and cultural milieu of the post-war period, Wood refers repeatedly to the “common people” with no clear definition of the folks he’s discussing.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2026 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Sea Runners
…it informs, it does not soar…
by Ivan Doig
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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”
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by Richard Subber | Jun 11, 2026 | Book reviews, Books
…achingly real characters, such love…
”And here I have lamely related to you
the uneventful chronicle
of two foolish children in a flat
who most unwisely sacrificed
for each other
the greatest treasures of their house.”
from “The Gift of the Magi” in The Four Million
by O. Henry (William Sydney Porter, 1862-1910)
Published April 1906
If you’re an O. Henry fan, you know the whole story of Della and Jim, the two foolish children who sold a beloved gold pocket watch and an entrancing fall of brown hair to buy innocently painful Christmas gifts for each other…even if you’re not an O. Henry fan, I’ll bet you know the story.
“The Gift of the Magi” is a signature O. Henry piece, with achingly real characters slip-sliding through lives shackled by just a touch too much hardship and garlanded with magnificently understated and oh-so-richly-expressed love, such love as never recedes or withers…
Mr. and Mrs. James Dillingham Young unselfconsciously give a master class in young love. The reader wants to be one of them despite their shabby flat and the narrow strictures of a tiny income and the endless prospect of a lesser cut of chops frying in the pan on the back of the tiny stove. The single-minded devotion—their profound and profligate endearment—of Jim and Della illuminates the power of O. Henry’s prose, and the delicacy of his imagination.
William Sydney Porter (1862-1910) used his pen name, O. Henry, for his published work. “The Gift of the Magi” was part of The Four Million, his second short story collection, when it appeared in 1906. He wrote more than 300 short stories.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2026 All rights reserved.
Movie review: Same Time, Next Year
all-American adultery, oh yeah…
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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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