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.
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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 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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by Richard Subber | Apr 26, 2025 | Book reviews, Books, Joys of reading, Language
Romantic historical fiction doesn’t get any better…
Consider the art of Rafael Sabatini (1875-1950)
Novelist extraordinaire
Sabatini was a more popular writer during his lifetime, when his trademark works of romantic, principled historical fiction were more accessible and more acceptable. If you have not read Scaramouche, you have deprived yourself. You will feel yourself to be a better, more lavishly happy person after you read it for the first time. There is the occasional swordplay in his novels, however, I warn you, most of the time his characters do nothing but talk. I think that’s all you need for a book review.
My interest here is to share a sample of his ingenious and engaging prose. This is from Saint Martin’s Summer...in fact, these are the first two paragraphs of the first chapter:
“My Lord of Tressan, His Majesty’s Seneschal of Dauphiny, sat at his ease, his purple doublet all undone, to yield greater freedom to his vast bulk, a yellow silken undergarment visible through the gap, as is visible the flesh of some fruit that, swollen with over-ripeness, has burst its skin.
“His wig—imposed upon him by necessity, not fashion—lay on the table amid a confusion of dusty papers, and on his little fat nose, round and red as a cherry at its end, rested the bridge of his horn-rimmed spectacles. His bald head—so bald and shining that it conveyed an unpleasant sense of nakedness, suggesting that its uncovering had been an act of indelicacy on the owner’s part—rested on the back of his great chair, and hid from sight the gaudy escutcheon wrought upon the crimson leather. His eyes were closed, his mouth open, and whether from that mouth or from his nose—or, perhaps, conflicting for issue between both—there came a snorting, rumbling sound to proclaim that my Lord the Seneschal was hard at work upon the King’s business.”
Maybe that’s all you need for a book review.
Eat your heart out, John Grisham.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Book review: American Colonies
So many and so much
came before the Pilgrims
by Alan Taylor
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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 | Apr 24, 2025 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature, Reflections
it’s not the last obscenity…
Book review:
Aging: An Apprenticeship
Nan Narboe, ed.
Portland, OR: Red Notebook Press, 2018
286 pages
Narboe creates a handy and wide-ranging collection of reflections on the art, science, and humanity of the aging process. More than 50 authors tell it like they think it is, for folks nearing the increasingly ordinary age of 50, and for folks in their 50s, 60s, 70s , 80s, and 90s and beyond. If you’re not in one of those groups, you will be sooner than you think.
Of course, the explicit premise of most of the authors in Aging: An Apprenticeship is that life can be good (or not), aging happens to everyone, and dying is the end game.
Gloria Steinem’s contribution is on point, completely tolerable, and instructive. She says:
“After all, we are communal creatures who must mirror each other to know who we are. Every living thing ages and dies, yet humans seem to be the only species that thinks about aging and thinks about dying. Surely, we are meant to use this ability, especially in a country that suffers so much from concealing aging and dying as if they were the last obscenities.”
For Aging: An Apprenticeship, Narboe collects essays that range from whimsical to doggone serious. Each author offers a very personal argument that aging and dying are 100% natural.
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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 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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