by Richard Subber | Jul 27, 2023 | Book reviews, Books, History
swords, and dragons, and boasting…
Book review:
Beowulf
Seamus Heaney, trans.
New York, W. W. Norton and Company, 2000
213 pages
A long time ago, a thousand years, give or take, an anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet writing in the Old English language completed a 3,182-line poem we call “Beowulf.”
Just about everyone thinks it’s a classic.
It hasn’t been adapted for TV yet, and there are a number of reasons for that. It’s heroic, but the modern English translation is dramatically flat.
It’s about tough guys with swords, and dragons, and mead halls, and manly boasting, and such.
Beowulf is everything it’s made out to be, and not much more.
I’m happy to assume that it was a more thrilling read and a more entrancing tale in the 9th or 10th century, or whenever it was first written and taken on the road by the storytellers.
Beowulf is a whole lot better than TV.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
Book review:
The American Revolution: A History
The “Founders” were afraid
of “democracy”…
by Gordon S. Wood
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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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by Richard Subber | Jul 20, 2023 | Joys of reading, Language, Tidbits
the right words
“He is hasped
and hooped
and hirpling with pain…”
Beowulf describing the wounded dragon, Grendel
Beowulf, p. 65
Seamus Heaney, trans.
New York, W. W. Norton and Company, 2000
Beowulf, the Old English epic poem, was written more than a thousand years ago. No one knows who wrote it.
He or she had a way with words.
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Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
Book review: Cleopatra: A Life
…don’t even think
about Gordon Gekko…
by Stacy Schiff
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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 | Jul 11, 2023 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature, Reflections
“…but not less”
Book review:
Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism
by Temple Grandin (b1947)
Foreword by Oliver Sacks
New York: Vintage Books, a Division of Random House, Inc., 1995, 2nd ed. 2006
270 pages
Thinking in Pictures is a calmly important book.
Probably you don’t know much about autism. Temple Grandin knows a lot, and she can teach you about the people who live lives that are different from yours. Really.
“Different, but not less.” That’s what her science teacher said about her.
She writes in a reserved tone, offering a grand sweep of what was known about autism in the mid 1990s and again in the mid 2000s. She talks about the high points and the low points of the rocky road of her life.
Temple Grandin talks with precocious understanding about animals. You’ll learn from this element as well.
I re-learned this very sobering truth: nearly everyone doesn’t experience the world the same way I do.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
The Reader (Der Vorleser)
Not just a rehash of WWII…
by Bernhard Schlink
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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 | 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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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 | Jun 27, 2023 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature, Joys of reading, Language
…death is an anticlimax…
Book review:
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
by Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos de Laclos
Originally published 1782
Translated as Dangerous Liaisons by Ernest Dowson, New York: Doubleday, 1998
Illustrations by Sylvain Sauvage
Les Liaisons Dangereuses is not a garden of delight.
This is a book about love, but the reader will find precious little of it in these pages.
An acquaintance dismissed this voluptuous tale, thus: “All they do is talk.”
Let’s begin there. The language is rich. I daresay that Laclos turns language into an erogenous zone in Les Liaisons Dangereuses.
If you aspire to a working understanding of good and evil, you could do worse than listen to the riveting chatter of the leading personae, who choose each word with careful, deliciously ribald, austerely cruel, and domineering intent. You really don’t want to be a friend, and you most assuredly don’t want to be an enemy.
Men, en garde! The Marquise de Merteuil impulsively thinks of cojones as table ornaments.
Ladies, away! The Vicomte de Valmont is a pirate lover, he sees women as prize ships ready for boarding.
One might wish to believe that the others are innocents: Cécile Volanges, Danceny, the Présidente de Tourvel. But, hold. Each of them seeks to play the game of love, but they are hardly able to distinguish winning from losing.
Yes, this is a boundless exposé of the worst elements—of human intrigue, self indulgence, hubris, vaunting egos, and careless poaching of souls—that masquerade as amour.
Yes, in a sense, the characters are stereotypes, but each is, remarkably, ingeniously, ingenuously, a masterpiece of the type. Laclos uses every pertinent word to make them real.
Yes, Les Liaisons is an ultimately degraded experience for both the characters and readers…ultimately, the reader must condemn the Marquise and the Vicomte for so many lives destroyed…death is an anticlimax in Liaisons Dangereuses.
The Marquise and the Vicomte are burdened with a moral framework that shuns the absolute—they have unimaginably unsatisfied desires, and no intellectual elaboration of right and wrong.
Yet, a gentle reader may offer these two a bare shred of pity.
The Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont swirl through their lives, casually jousting with each other as they amuse themselves in controlling the fates of other men and women, but remaining unaware that they are not in control of their own fates.
Note for bibliophiles: Whether you read this in the original French, or in the lush translation by Ernest Dowson, accept the pain of experiencing a literary style that is no longer in vogue, prepare yourself for Laclos’ fabulous late 18th century style that discards a simple declarative sentence, readily, with apparent joy, whenever a sentence heavily laden with clauses, phrases, and modifiers will do just as well, heedless of the effect on a reader, whose inclination may be to appreciate the writhing drama of this story, with somewhat fewer words.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Snow Goose
…sensual drama, eminently poetic…
by Paul Gallico
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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 | Jun 13, 2023 | American history, Books, History, Politics, Power and inequality
the men in gray went AWOL
Book review:
Bitterly Divided: The South’s Inner Civil War
by David Williams
New York: The New Press, 2008
310 pages
Wow! Bitterly Divided is a game-changing perspective on the causes and conduct of the American Civil War.
Read this compellingly researched book by David Williams to get the details.
Some highlights:
About a half million black and white Southerners served in the Union army, about 25% of the total number of men in arms wearing blue uniforms.
There was substantial opposition to secession in every state that seceded. Politicians and rich slaveholders literally corrupted the elections to make secession happen.
In the latter years of the war, at any given time as many as two-thirds of the common soldiers in the Confederate army were absent with or without leave. General Lee worried persistently about deserters.
The Confederate armed forces always had enough ammunition, but the soldiers and their wives and families at home never had enough food—because rich plantation owners insisted on planting the more profitable tobacco and cotton crops.
The Civil War was fought about slavery—because the big slaveholders refused to give up their source of free labor.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
Book review: “Bartleby, the Scrivener”
Here is loneliness beyond understanding…
by Herman Melville
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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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