by Richard Subber | Nov 3, 2021 | American history, Book reviews, Books, Democracy, History, Politics
the “public watchdog,” as if…
Book review:
-30- The Collapse
of the Great American Newspaper
Charles M. Madigan, ed.
Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, Publisher, 2007
Madigan collected 15 commentaries on the continuing decline of the American newspaper industry and the woeful prospects for its improvement or survival.
The authors of Collapse do not offer predictions, but the adverse circumstances they describe as existing or possible seem all too real almost 15 years later.
Community newspapers have mostly disappeared or shriveled in vitality and importance.
Big city newspapers have been transformed into cash conduits by profit-seeking money managers, who as a group don’t care about doing or preserving the popular (and dubious) legacy concept of journalism as “a public watchdog.”
At every level of government, from township zoning hearing board to U.S. Congress, fewer and fewer reporters—or no reporters—are showing up to observe what’s going on and report it to a citizenry that historically has never wanted to pay the full cost of getting “the news.”
The basic business model of newspaper owners today is: soak the aging, shriveling group of home delivery subscribers for as much as they will pay, and soak the shriveling group of newspaper advertisers for as much as they will pay, for as long as they’re willing to pay. One by one, newspapers are disappearing.
For example, the seven-day home delivery price of The Boston Globe is about $25/week, or almost $1,300/year.
Do you remember how much a newspaper cost when you were a kid?
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2021 All rights reserved.
We Were Soldiers Once…and Young
…too much death (book review)
Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore (ret.)
and Joseph L. Galloway
–
My first name was rain: A dreamery of poems with 53 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 | Sep 25, 2021 | Book reviews, Books, History, World history
tender and mournful…
Book review:
The Zookeeper’s Wife
by Diane Ackerman (b1948)
American naturalist, poet, and author
New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007
368 pages
Diane Ackerman writes about terrifying experiences, in Poland during World War II, that are not too terrible to be put into words.
Antonina is the zookeeper’s wife in Warsaw. She and her family and friends are eyewitnesses unable to escape the terror of the German invasion of Poland in 1939.
Many are killed or “transported” to the concentration camps.
Many continue to live ruined lives, in constant fear of misery, pain, and death, and with at least sporadic hope that they have a future they will welcome.
“One puzzle of daily life…was this: How do you retain a spirit of affection and humor in a crazed, homicidal, unpredictable society? Killers passed them daily on zoo grounds, death…stalked people at random in the streets.”
Ackerman writes a tender and mournful account of the instinctive courage of the children to forsake their childhood, and suffer with the adults—it’s so hard to read it without tears.
The Zookeeper’s Wife may be the most emotionally burdensome book I’ve read.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2021 All rights reserved.
Book review: American Colonies
So many and so much
came before the Pilgrims
by Alan Taylor
–
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 30, 2021 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature, Reflections
Learn to think about being old…
Book review:
Old Friends
by Tracy Kidder (b1945)
Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1993
352 pages
Tracy Kidder is an old friend, and I welcome any opportunity to read something he wrote. There is vigor and bitter reality and calm truth and pulsing delight in his stories.
Whatever your age, try Old Friends. You’re going to be someone’s old friend, sooner or later. You can learn to think about how it’s going to be.
Like Kidder’s other books, Old Friends is in its own category. Nevertheless, it has themes you’ll find in his other books. It contains some kinds of the loneliness expressed in Strength in What Remains (2009), and it echoes some of the humanity that pervades Among Schoolchildren (1989).
You’ll be surprised as you get to know Lou and Joe and the others.
They’re like people you already know, and like real people you’re going to get to know.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2021 All rights reserved.
Mary Jane Oliver, R. I. P.
She wrote so many of the right words…
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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 22, 2021 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Politics, Power and inequality, World history
profitable, powerful, vicious…
Book review:
For All the Tea in China:
How England Stole the World’s Favorite Drink
and Changed History
by Sarah Rose
New York: Viking, Penguin Group, 2010
This is a credible account of how tea from China became a worldwide drink.
With commanding competence, Rose relates the intrepid life of Robert Fortune, and the depressingly familiar tale of a giant corporation running amok.
The East India Company in England was an extremely vicious, extremely powerful, and extremely profitable company for more than two hundred years. It was tea from the East India Company that got dumped into Boston harbor on December 16, 1773. After a bloody 1857 war of its own making in India, the company was abruptly dissolved by the British Parliament. Rose says: “…the company had amassed possessions to rival Charlemagne’s and created an empire on which the sun never set; it was the first global multinational and the largest corporation history has ever known. Yet it failed spectacularly at one significant task: to govern India in peace.” No surprise there.
For my taste, the greater value of For All the Tea in China is the examination of how the commerce and consumption of tea shaped worldwide politics, warfare, and society. Tea reduced famine in Europe. Tea taxes financed Britain’s imperial expansion. Increased tea drinking—and increased sugar consumption—made the British sugar colonies important in British commerce and politics. Centuries of monopoly in tea production and engagement with Europeans altered the political and cultural development of China.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2021 All rights reserved.
Book review: American Colonies
So many and so much
came before the Pilgrims
by Alan Taylor
–
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 | Jun 5, 2021 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Human Nature, Politics
…the Irish weren’t the only ones…
Book review:
How the Irish Became White
by Noel Ignatiev (1940-2019)
American author and historian
New York: Routledge, 1995
Ignatiev offers enough detail and context to satisfy historians of every stripe.
For the less ambitious reader, there may be a bit more than she cares to know in How the Irish Became White.
Of course, I certainly don’t presume to summarize the author’s careful exposition in 233 pages.
If you really want to know more about how non-black immigrants allowed and persuaded themselves to buy in to the systemic racism that flourished in America since the 17th century, dig in to How the Irish Became White.
One sure point is: don’t pick on the Irish exclusively. They certainly weren’t alone in their transgressions.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2021 All rights reserved.
We Were Soldiers Once…and Young
…way too much death (book review)
Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore (ret.)
and Joseph L. Galloway
–
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”
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by Richard Subber | Mar 30, 2021 | Book reviews, Books, Joys of reading, Language, Poetry, Reviews of other poets
even baseball in the dark…
Home Team: Poems About Baseball
by Edwin Romond
West Hartford, CT: Grayson Books, 2018
You really don’t have to be a baseball fan to feel the joy that just won’t quit in Romond’s offering of romantic poems about baseball.
I mean romantic in the sense of the 19th century Romantic Era, when practitioners in most of the arts were focused on the many dimensions of intense emotion and esthetic experience.
You will discover that Romond’s poetry has so much of longing, and recognition, and acceptance, and the joys we can find in everyday life, and Home Team has many versions of all that.
My favorite is “Baseball in the Dark,” a ripe recollection of a young boy’s dream that he could again hear radio broadcaster Mel Allen’s “summer voice going, going, on and on…telling me baseball in the dark.” That would be a downright good thing to do, and Romond knows a lot of those things.
You can check out Romond’s poetry books on his website, click here.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2021 All rights reserved.
The poetic art of Grace Butcher
Poetry for reading out loud…
it’s that good
Book review: Child, House, World
My first name was rain: A dreamery of poems with 53 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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