by Richard Subber | Nov 16, 2023 | Book reviews, Books, Joys of reading
a new take on the Western…
Book review:
The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard
New York: William Morris, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 2004
528 pages
I’m late to the game of reading Elmore Leonard, and I confess right here that I’m not a big fan of the broadly defined “Western” genre, excepting of course the “must reads” like “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” and “To Build a Fire” and “The Call of the Wild.”
Even so, I’m engaged with Leonard’s short story style, and I plan to return to The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard—his 30 Western shorts including possibly familiar titles like “Three-Ten to Yuma” and “Moment of Vengeance” and “Only Good Ones.”
The prose is direct, realistic, and dialogue-rich, and there is legitimate suspense that gives individuality to each story.
Try a few.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 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 | Oct 31, 2023 | Book reviews, Books, Joys of reading, Language
sassy, salty, and singular
Book review:
The Kingdom of the Kid:
Growing Up In The Long-Lost Hamptons
by Geoff Gehman (b1958)
State University of New York Press, Albany, NY 2013
238 pages
I stepped outside my comfort zone to read Geoff Gehman’s memoir about some of his childhood years in the “long-lost Hamptons.” I’m glad I did.
If you have a particular point of view about memoirs, either for or against, try to forget it and pick up The Kingdom of the Kid, and just settle in for the ride.
This is more than a prosaic romp through childhood memories, it is a paean celebrating a child’s-eye-view of life.
Gehman is a writer who likes to “linger over words,” that’s my kind of writer. His prose, his stories, his memories…sassy, salty and singular.
Gehman is a poet, too. Repeatedly, he offers lush insight into his industrious youth, his friendships with the young and the old, his affinity for the place, the “long-lost Hamptons” where Geoff and his pals spent the good old days.
He describes the scene as he observed mourners in the Wainscott Cemetery:
“…I sat on my bike in the school parking lot, shaded by grand sycamores, and watched visitors treat the cemetery with reverence. They placed flowers by graves, prayed on their knees, cried on their backs. They stared at the sky, held séances in broad daylight, eavesdropped on eternity.
“Those pilgrims taught me the morality of mortality. Without asking anyone I learned to walk around the stones, to respect the dead as if they were alive.”
In every chapter he offers another little piece of his heart.
The Kingdom of the Kid is good reading. Real good.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Bridges of Madison County
If you’re looking for
highly stoked eroticism
and high-rolling lives
that throw off sparks when they touch,
look elsewhere.
by Robert Waller
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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, 2023 | Book reviews, Books, Joys of reading
find your groove…
Book review:
The Element:
How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything
by Ken Robinson, with Lou Aronica
New York: Viking, Penguin Group, 2009
274 pages
The theme of The Element is an exciting concept to think about.
I love his telling of this story: the six-year-old girl is hunched over her drawing, and she tells her teacher that she’s “drawing a picture of God,” and the teacher says “nobody knows what God looks like,” and the girl replies: “They will in a minute.”
Robinson tackles his inspirational advice: find your own distinctive talents and passions, and, when you recognize them, you’ll know you’re in the Zone, and you’ll love it.
Here’s what hinders us from finding our own Elements: we don’t fully understand the range of our capacities, how these salient capacities relate to each other, and how much potential we have to get better at stuff that makes us feel really good. (p. 9)
“The Element is the meeting point between natural aptitude and personal passion.” (p. 21)
“The highest form of intelligence is thinking creatively.” (p. 56)
“You can think of creativity as applied imagination.” (p. 67)
I think the first few chapters of The Element are enough to open your eyes and your mind to the wonderful challenge of tracking down and embracing your personal Element, if you haven’t done it already.
The rest of the book suggests that Robinson’s Element does not cover the talent for ending a book after you’ve said all that needs to be said. He wanders, and you might get bored.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
The “dime novels” in the Civil War
Think “blood-and-thunder”…
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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 | Aug 31, 2022 | Book reviews, Books, Joys of reading, Theater and play reviews
the movies ignore the real story…
Movie review:
The Scarlet Letter
by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
Published 1850
I watched three films based on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s iconic story, The Scarlet Letter. My small sample (there are at least nine movies based on the story) confirms that Hollywood really can’t stand the story as Hawthorne wrote it.
Read my review of Hawthorne’s book, click here.
In 1934 Colleen Moore played Hester Prynne and Hardie Albright played Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale in the tale about Puritan condemnation of adultery and children born out of wedlock. Hester is sentenced to wear an embroidered scarlet letter “A” on her bosom, and Dimmesdale endlessly rationalizes his decision to conceal his role as the mysterious father of little Pearl. The movie reflects the production limitations and typical dramatic direction in the 1930s—there’s a lot of staring into the camera, and crowded action scenes.
Meg Foster played Hester and John Heard played Dimmesdale in the 1979 TV miniseries about The Scarlet Letter. There are recognizable scenes from the book. The script is nondescript. It’s a ponderous distillation of Hawthorne’s words.
The 1996 version with Demi Moore as Hester and Gary Oldman as Dimmesdale apparently is the latest in the unsatisfying series of film versions of The Scarlet Letter. It is an almost lurid mal-adaptation of the book. The hot scenes featuring Hester and Dimmesdale attracted to each other are a complete invention—Hawthorne eschews any explicit reference or description of physical intimacy between his principal characters. Demi and Gary get it on, but it ain’t Hawthorne.
In all three films, the role of little Pearl is deliberately underplayed. The child is a principal factor in the story—her feelings, her joie de vivre, her contemplations, her maturation are fully explored in the book, and ignored in the movies.
The mental and emotional quagmires that are explored and endured by Hester and Dimmesdale are generally ignored in the movies. None of the movies uses the ending that fulfills the book.
In short, in my mind, if you want to claim that you are familiar with the themes, plot, and denouement of The Scarlet Letter, you have to read the book.
All of the movies are scandalously thin and false charades of the powerful drama of Hawthorne’s story that was published very successfully in 1850.
If you think you remember reading it a long time ago, try it again.
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Movie review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2022 All rights reserved.
Book review: Shantung Compound
They really didn’t care much
about each other…
by Langdon Gilkey
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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 | Jan 23, 2022 | Book reviews, Books, Books Commentary, Joys of reading
a really good book about books…
Book review:
84, Charing Cross Road
by Helene Hanff
New York: Grossman Publishers, 1970
84, Charing Cross Road is a perhaps iconic epistolary opus and a minor delight for bibliophile readers.
Helene Hanff (1916-1997) was an antiquarian book freak in New York City who was thrilled to have a 20-year long-distance relationship by mail with the staff of a small book shop in London at 84, Charing Cross Road, namely, Marks & Co.
Her love of books, her humanity, and her blithe spirit are on display, as is the somewhat reserved and very British geniality of Frank Doel and the staffers at Marks & Co. who kept Helene supplied with the obscure old books that she loved so much.
If you’re still reading this review, you probably are ready to start reading the book.
Otherwise, you know…
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2022 All rights reserved.
Book review: Hag-Seed
by Margaret Atwood…it ain’t Shakespeare
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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 5, 2022 | Joys of reading, Language
I won’t show you mine…
You can learn something from Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (1922-2007)
Now, Vonnegut isn’t my favorite writer. Yes, of course, I’ve read Slaughterhouse-Five. OK, that puts me in the “I’ve read Slaughterhouse-Five” category. To paraphrase Woody Allen, the novel has to do with World War II and stuff…
OK, sorry about that downer intro. I don’t incline to sound like a Vonnegut fan when I say that the following anecdote is a glorious insight that moves me.
In 2006, shortly before his death, Vonnegut gave some advice to five New York City high school guys who had written to him:
“. . . Here’s an assignment for tonight,
and I hope Ms. Lockwood will flunk you if you don’t do it:
Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed . . .
Make it as good as you possibly can.
But don’t tell anybody what you’re doing.
Don’t show it or recite it to anybody,
not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood. OK?
Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them . . .
You will find that you have already been
gloriously rewarded for your poem.
You have experienced becoming,
learned a lot more about what’s inside you,
and you have made your soul grow.”
Oh yes, I’m writing my poem now.
Don’t show me yours.
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Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2022 All rights reserved.
–
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”
* * * * * *
