by Richard Subber | Jul 10, 2025 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Human Nature, Power and inequality
The Indians had a point of view…
Book review:
Red Brethren:
The Brothertown and Stockbridge Indians
and the Problem of Race in Early America
by David J. Silverman
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010
279 pages
Red Brethren is a scholarly deep dive into the experiences and mindsets of the First Americans who first tried to tolerate and later resisted the imperious impositions of the European colonists in North America.
The Indians left almost no record in their own writing, but Silverman exercises the customary technique of extrapolating Indian thoughts and attitudes from the written European record.
In the context of the widespread (not universal, still controversial) understanding that “race” is a social construct and a destructive concept, it is a bit puzzling that Silverman uses various manifestations of “race” in his analysis.
Nevertheless, he makes it plain that we have so much to learn about what the indigenous peoples thought of the European invaders, and how the thinking of our Red Brethren changed over time.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Movie review: Same Time, Next Year
all-American adultery, oh yeah…
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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 | Jul 6, 2025 | Book reviews, Books
no fireworks here…
Book review:
The Awakening
and Selected Stories of Kate Chopin
by Kate Chopin (1850-1904)
Louisiana author
New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2004
296 pages
There are no fireworks and little spark in Kate Chopin’s prose.
Her characters and her plots seem quotidian at best, and more like hum-drum.
In her time she was a ground-breaking writer of feminist themes, but her stories simply are not thrilling in the 21st century.
As I tried to read The Awakening, I realized that I was trying to imagine how it would have felt doing the same thing 125 years ago. I failed.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Book review: “The Gentle Boy”
The Puritans had a dark side…
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
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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 | Jun 7, 2025 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature, Joys of reading
intensely human emotions…
Book review:
Small Things Like These
by Claire Keegan (b1968)
New York: Grove Press, 2021
118 pages
Much of Small Things Like These qualifies for an “ordinary” description, but the reader repeatedly is invited to experience such intensely human emotions that it’s troubling to turn the page and continue reading…
Bill Furlong, a coal dealer living a small life in a small town, rescues a forsaken girl, and understands that there is “fresh, new, unrecognizable joy in his heart,” but he dreads what is “yet to come…” The girl is a hapless pawn in an enduring evil reality.
Keegan knows how to tell the reader about that joy, in her smooth and enticing prose that creates credible people living credible lives in a small place that makes room for great hearts.
She gives us reason to imagine that more people are willing to do good.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Book review: Who Built America?
…including people
who got their hands dirty
by Christopher Clark and Nancy Hewitt
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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”
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by Richard Subber | May 27, 2025 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature, Joys of reading, Language, Reflections
these characters are yearning, yearning…
Book review:
Victory
by Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)
New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., 1928
412 pages
It may be that it is enough to say about Victory that it is lush prose that wraps around your mind and leaves you sated at the end of every chapter.
Conrad’s style, I dare to say, is not for every modern taste. It is dialogue-rich. The action is spare. For me, the essential appeal of Victory is the reflective context of the characters’ state of mind: their imaginations, their aspirations, their candid self-assessments.
In Victory, there is enough honesty, enough resignation, enough disappointment, enough yearning to make you feel like you want to claim that your life is good.
At least, good enough.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 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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by Richard Subber | May 22, 2025 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature, Politics, Power and inequality
What if we run out of fish?
Book review:
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
by Elizabeth Kolbert
New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2014
319 pages
The unsurprising but unfamiliar takeaway from The Sixth Extinction: global climate change isn’t the only globally devastating problem that we have to deal with because it may make human beings extinct on our planet.
Mankind and womankind are changing the biosphere of Earth: animals, other living creatures, and plants are being extinguished at a devastating high rate, as a result of human agency. In the plainest terms: we need these animals, other living organisms, and plants in order to survive. There is no substitute for them.
We’re not just talking about a few snail darters in an environmentally endangered stream somewhere, and Kolbert isn’t doing sloganeering about “save the whales” or anything like that.
Extinctions of important elements in the natural food chain are continuing and accelerating, as a result of humans’ ability to interact with nature in both positive and negative ways on every land mass and body of water on the surface of the globe. Changes in the environment and changes in the food chain are happening too fast for many species to adapt and survive. What do we do if bees stop pollinating our fruit trees? What do we do if the oceans continue to become more acidic and won’t support the fish stocks we rely on for food?
The Sixth Extinction is a frightening read. It’s also a more difficult read than it needs to be: Kolbert’s prose is engaging and literate (this isn’t a beach book, no way), but it seems like she wrote two different books and then shuffled their pages together. Her devastating and irrefutable message is nearly obscured by her detailed treatment of example species like penguins, foraminifera, graptolites, corals, and little brown bats. Be prepared to skim.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Book review:
American Scripture:
Making the Declaration of Independence
…basically, it’s trash talk to King George
by Pauline Maier
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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 10, 2025 | American history, Book reviews, Books, Democracy, History, Joys of reading, Politics, Power and inequality
seemingly unavoidable…
Book review:
The Demon of Unrest
by Erik Larson (b1954)
New York: Crown Publishing Group, div. of Penguin Random House, 2024
565 pages
You’ll recognize the casually engaging prose and the dedicated storytelling style of Erik Larson. It’s a pleasure to read everything he writes.
Larson digs deep to explore the nature of the “demon of unrest” that made trouble for decades and wouldn’t stop provoking the evil sentiments and the violent politics that preceded the historic outbreak of the American Civil War in the Charleston harbor in April 1861.
The Demon of Unrest names and spotlights all the characters who played mostly behind-the-scenes roles as Lincoln and Davis and Beauregard and Scott and Seward and Ruffin and their well-known colleagues blustered and schemed and waited and welcomed and feared the seemingly unavoidable war to end slavery.
No matter how much you know, you’ll learn something more about the assault on Ft. Sumter by reading this book.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
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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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