by Richard Subber | Jan 22, 2026 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature
think “victims”
Book review:
The Anxious Generation
by Jonathan Haidt (b1963)
New York: Penguin Press, 2024
385 pages
Haidt’s book is subtitled How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. If you think he’s talking about the internet, and cell phones, and computers, and television, and social media, you’re right on the money.
“Screen time” and all of the accompanying behaviors are making our kids sick.
It seems a bit strange to me that Haidt did not use the word “victims” in The Anxious Generation. All those folks didn’t ask for smart phones and devices when they were born.
Haidt makes compelling arguments that too much “screen time” is devastating too many young people, and old people too. Among his suggested pathways to remedy:
Just say “no.”
Don’t use social media today.
Use crayons with your young grandchildren.
You probably didn’t have a phone with you when you were a school student.
Your kids don’t need one.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2026 All rights reserved.
A quote from General Custer
Hint: something to do with Indians…
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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 | Jan 18, 2026 | Book reviews, Books
enticements to reverie…
Book review:
Twice-Told Tales
by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
London: J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd.
First published in 1837 (first series) and 1842 (second series)
This edition first printed 1911, reprinted 1964.
357 pages.
We preserve the remnants of our youth in chambers of the brain that often are, for good or ill, inaccessible to our conscious minds.
The baubles of memory in Twice-Told Tales are potent sparks that guide us to the once-remembered moments, the enticements to lingering reverie that fills new moments with newly imagined memories that rescue us from once-remembered despair, and fill the blank spaces with second chances.
Hawthorne collected such moments of youth, such bauble treasure, in “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment,” in the fertile and fervid desperations of four venerable friends who eagerly swallow an elixir that boosts them to a capering re-enactment of their youth—but oh, so brief, so immaterial, so ephemeral that the long glass in the room can only reflect their withered miens, and none of the hot young beauty that they see again, for precious moments, in the emboldened gazes that they share.
Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales include “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” and 38 other short stories (originally published in 1837 and 1842) showing off his evocative prose, embracing a wide range of human emotions.
You’ll be able to find something you like.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2026 All rights reserved.
Book review: Lord of the Flies
Never more relevant…
by William Golding
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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 | Jan 4, 2026 | Book reviews, Books, History, Human Nature
the work of mortal men and women…
Book review:
The Rise of Christianity:
A Sociologist Reconsiders History
by Rodney Stark (1934-2022)
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996
246 pages
The rise of Christianity in the centuries after the life of Jesus relied on the work of mortal women and men.
Stark offers a patient and compelling description of how Christianity spread from Nazareth in Galilee and became a powerful force throughout the known Greco-Roman world before Emperor Constantine embraced the faith early in the 4th century AD.
This is not a “religious” book. The words “bible,” “hymn,” “communion,” “priest,” “Pope,” and “prayer” are not in the index. The Rise of Christianity acknowledges but does not dwell on the doctrinal aspects of the Christian faith in the early years.
I wouldn’t presume to summarize Stark’s account of the sociological, emotional, and political factors that enabled the rise of Christianity.
You may find it surprising and valuable to know that the new religion appealed to both the rich and the poor, that women were the majority of first converts, that women held leadership positions in the early churches, and that the Christian commitment to help one another notably enabled the Christian communities to do better in surviving the plagues that killed so many people in the early centuries (the pantheons of non-Christian gods were conspicuously unhelpful).
Stark says: “Finally, what Christianity gave to its converts was nothing less than their humanity. In this sense, virtue was its own reward.” (p215)
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2026 All rights reserved.
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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 | Dec 25, 2025 | American history, Book reviews, Books, Joys of reading, Language
“…I feel a goneness…”
Book review:
Golden Tales of New England
May Lamberton Becker, ed.
New York: Bonanza Books, 1931
378 pages
Writers used a different kind of language to create feel-good stories in the 19th century.
Golden Tales of New England is a feel-good sample of 17 of them.
You’ll recognize some of the authors: Hawthorne, Thoreau, Louisa Alcott, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Harriet Beecher Stowe…
The others might be new for you, as they are for me, like the offering of Rose Terry Cooke (1827-1892), “A Town Mouse and a Country Mouse.” It’s an authentic, ample exhibition of New England patois and sturdy New England character. Meet “Mandy” and “M’lindy,” two aging sisters who were born Amanda and Melinda, and who were fated to share their living, mostly at a distance but, in the end, so inescapably together.
Here’s Amanda sadly recounting her sister’s death: “I guess I’ve got through…[Melinda] went an’ married that old Parker, an’ then she up and died. I wish’t I’d ha’ stayed with her longer; mabbe she wouldn’t have died. She wa’n’t old; not nigh so old as I be…I feel a goneness that I never had ketch hold o’ me before…”
Hawthorne’s “Old Esther Dudley” is a dainty adoration of a venerable lady who never gave up being a Tory during the Revolutionary War, and persisted in being the almost ghostly guardian of Province House in Boston after the British departed.
The other Golden Tales are equally exotic morsels of what entertained the citizens of the Republic long before television and Twitter.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
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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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by Richard Subber | Dec 21, 2025 | American history, Book reviews, Books, Democracy, History, Politics, Power and inequality
“nationalism” is an obstacle
Book review:
This America: The Case for the Nation
by Jill Lepore
New York: Liveright Publishing Corp., 2019
150 pages
The United States has been a recognizable entity barely—barely—long enough to be a nation.
Today we barely acknowledge our American Indian heritages, which could be part of our nationhood if we thought about it once or twice.
Jill Lepore offers what she is so good at offering: a sensible and informed discussion of what “nation” means, and why “nationalism” is an obstacle to the good life, and why “liberalism” should be what we like to talk about.
Read This America to get her details. Read it and talk about it.
Of course, her book is a political discourse, but it is not rabidly partisan. It’s something to think about.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Old Friends (book review)
Tracy Kidder tells truth about old age…
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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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by Richard Subber | Dec 16, 2025 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Language, Revolutionary War
what does “self-evident” mean?
Book review:
The Greatest Sentence Ever Written
by Walter Isaacson (b1952)
New York: Simon & Schuster, 2025
67 pages
First, let’s get this straight: it’s worth your time to read this little book.
Maybe you think you know all you want to know about the Declaration of Independence, but I think you’ll learn at least a couple things of interest as you read The Greatest Sentence Ever Written.
For starters, Thomas Jefferson did not “write” the Declaration. He more or less wrote the first draft, and then his committee—including Benjamin Franklin and John Adams—applied their pens, and then the Continental Congress had its final say.
Isaacson’s “greatest sentence” is the second sentence of the Declaration, beginning “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” The words of the sentence had specific meanings for educated men (no ladies in the Congress) with Enlightenment prejudices in the late 18th century, and the committee and Congress changed a number of the words in Jefferson’s draft. For example, Jefferson originally wrote “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable…”
Keep these “undeniable” circumstances in mind: in July 1776 no member of the Congress knew how the whole “revolution” thing would turn out, and the Declaration did not start the revolution: the shooting war had started more than a year earlier in Lexington and Concord.
Isaacson is a popular biographer, and this little book is a good example of his writing talents.
For a more in-depth treatment by a noted historian, try reading American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence by Pauline Maier.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2026 All rights reserved.
Book review: Grace Notes
Is it prose or poetry?
by Brian Doyle
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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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