by Richard Subber | Mar 5, 2023 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History
they weren’t heroic…
Book review:
Go Down Together:
The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde
by Jeff Guinn (b1951)
New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009
467 pages
Newspaper coverage in the early 1930s turned Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow into nationwide celebrities. Movies and books have perpetuated the carelessly positive news coverage, and the often fictional heroic antics of the crime duo.
The matter-of-fact treatment in Go Down Together makes the unvarnished reality more clear: Bonnie and Clyde were wacky, violent, and vicious criminals who killed 13 people and spent their 21-month crime spree on the run, mostly living “…the mundane, routine Barrow Gang misery of camping in cars and dining on cans of cold beans.”
They were killed in an ambush on May 23, 1934, in Louisiana. Several officers of the law fired about 160 bullets at them in less than 20 seconds—neither Bonnie nor Clyde fired a single shot.
Nothing about them makes a pretty picture.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
We Were Soldiers Once…and Young
…too much death (book review)
Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore (ret.)
and Joseph L. Galloway
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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 | Feb 25, 2023 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, World history
engrossing, but not Larson’s best…
Book review:
Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania
by Erik Larson (b1954)
Crown Publishers, New York, 2015
430 pages
I’m a fan of Erik Larson, starting with The Devil in the White City. Dead Wake offers a similar reading experience in Larson’s “no frippery” prose, and with a consistent tension that makes it a page turner.
I confess that it’s hard to avoid the somewhat deadening spoiler in this story: from Page 1, we know how it’s going to end. Torpedoed by Germany’s U-20, the Lusitania went down in about 18 minutes. Larson’s approach is exclusively chronological; it’s not a bad thing, but I found myself almost thinking out loud—“let’s get on with it”—as I navigated through the certainly more than adequate number of anecdotal scenes involving the ill-fated passengers and their clothing/meals/flirtations/premonitions/self-assurances…
Full disclosure: to the end, I was rooting for passenger Theodate Pope to get some love in her life. On the other hand, I now know far more than I care to know about President Wilson’s mushy courting of Edith Galt (who became his second wife).
The thing is, Larson tells a great yarn here but he doesn’t invite the reader to grapple with it. It falls short of shattering, consequential drama. The sociable elements—the almost chatty context—of much of his tale seem to displace full engagement with the terror of the event, and the outcomes that it hastened.
Larson tries to invest this story with solemnity, respect, and understanding.
Dead Wake is a dutiful—indeed, engrossing—account, but it doesn’t quite rise to the occasion.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
Play review: A Doll’s House
Henrik Ibsen’s classic on abuse…
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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 | Feb 8, 2023 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Politics
the Battle of the Greasy Grass…
Book review:
Lakota America:
A New History of Indigenous Power
by Pekka Hämäläinen
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019
530 pages
It’s just fabulously interesting to learn more and more about the lives, the cultures, and the civilizations of the American Indians who were in quite a number of catbird seats in the continental United States until well into the 19th century.
Don’t forget that the Battle of the Little Bighorn—“Custer’s Last Stand”—known to Indian survivors as the Battle of the Greasy Grass—played out on June 25, 1876, more than a decade after the Civil War, in the same year that Alexander Graham Bell patented his telephone.
The Lakota, one of three major groups of the Sioux Indians, were dominant in the high plains west of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River. They became a culture on horseback, and they depended on the buffalo.
In Lakota America you’ll learn that the Lakota were not tyrants, and they were not masters of every moment and every cluster of people in their domain, but mostly they called the shots for a long time.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Comanche Empire
the other story of the American West…
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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”
Your comments are welcome—tell me what you’re thinking.
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by Richard Subber | Feb 5, 2023 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature, Power and inequality
it’s not about rational choices…
Book review:
What’s Wrong with Economics?
A Primer for the Perplexed
by Robert Jacob Alexander, Baron Skidelsky (b1939)
New Haven, CT: Yales University Press, 2020
223 pages
Skidelsky has written a powerfully convergent book about the origins and enduring nature of economics and the lamentably over-hyped concept of Homo economicus.
“Economic Man”—the human calculating machine that continuously, exclusively acts in the most rational way to achieve maximum value at minimum cost—exists only in the imaginations of economists who invented him to fit their equally fictitious models of human behavior and modern economic activity.
In a nutshell: “…the neoclassical model of rational behaviour based on fixed preferences, complete contracts, and ample relevant information is the wrong one.” (p. 90)
What’s Wrong with Economics? will help you understand what’s wrong with our current so-called capitalist system and the people, companies, and governments that it mostly benefits.
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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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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 | Jan 23, 2023 | Book reviews, Books, History, World history
a wonkish analysis of combat…
Book review:
Military Power:
Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle
by Stephen Biddle
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004
337 pages
Military Power is a fastidiously wonkish analysis of combat and military power.
Biddle makes his case for considering that “force employment,” i.e., combat doctrine and tactics, is at least as important in understanding the outcomes of battle as the count of who has the most guns and the biggest armies.
Earlier authors might have called it “leadership.”
Biddle offers remarkably detailed blow-by-blow commentary about the second battle of the Somme River in 1918, the Allies’ Normandy breakout in 1944, and Operation Desert Storm in 1991.
It’s not an easy read. Military Power will reward the reader who wants to know more.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 20232 All rights reserved.
Book review:
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
from the agile mind
of Arthur Conan Doyle
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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 18, 2023 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature, Joys of reading
love and trust and good will…
Book review:
Silas Marner
by Mary Ann Evans “George Eliot” (1819-1880)
English novelist, an icon in Victorian literature
New York: The Macmillan Company, 1899, repr. 1932
348 pages
Silas Marner is, ultimately, a story of love and trust and good will in a world that tolerates all of the manifestations of the human spirit, both good and ill.
The story invites you to pay attention to the good guys.
Evans (Eliot) offers some of her insights regarding “people whose lives have been made various by learning.” (p. 24)
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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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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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