by Richard Subber | Apr 23, 2026 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History
Three dynamic decades in America…
Book review:
Society and Culture in America: 1830-1860
Russell Blaine Nye (1913-1993)
The New American Nation Series, Henry Steele Commager and Richard B. Morris, eds.
New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1974
432 pages
Nye tells a great big story, in sufficient detail for the serious student, and with enough style to satisfy any more casual, interested reader. If you don’t find a lot in this volume that matches and illuminates your interests, then you need to get out more.
In Society and Culture in America: 1830-1860, the decades before the American Civil War are remarkably filled with Americans and American society spreading and maturing in all directions.
Wagon trains were crossing the largely unmapped west (the transcontinental railroad wasn’t completed until May 1869).
European performing artists were getting top billing all over the United States—that is, all 33 of the states—while American musical arts were building up steam.
Education became effectively accessible for quite a few of the 20 million Americans who were eager to learn. “Sunday schools” (based on a British philanthropist’s program to set up schools for poor kids in Britain on Sundays, when the kids weren’t working) started catching on after the turn of the 19th century, and then they blossomed when churches got into the business to teach reading and writing, and, of course, elements of their respective faiths. All kinds of volunteer societies established “institutes” to spread learning. The “lyceum”—a locally sponsored program of uplifting lectures—was popular everywhere. By 1860, every state in the union offered at least elementary and secondary education, funded by tax dollars.
I could go on and on. Nye did so for 432 pages. The life of the nation in three dynamic decades, 1830-1860, is a great big story.
* * * * * *
Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2026 All rights reserved.
Book review: Saint Joan
by George Bernard Shaw
–
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”
* * * * * *
by Richard Subber | Apr 21, 2026 | Books, Joys of reading, My poetry, Poetry
be ready…
Book-ish
Pick up that book again.
Yes, too many words,
too many pages.
In there, somewhere,
a lustrous phrase
you didn’t see,
a deepest thought
you didn’t think,
a relic of song
you didn’t sing,
a wayward dream
you didn’t know,
a sequence of best words,
they were a blur.
Take the book again,
open it where you will,
be ready for something more.
June 20, 2025
* * * * * *
My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2026 All rights reserved.
–
Empyrean: new poems with 57 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”
Your comments are welcome—tell me what you’re thinking.
* * * * * *
by Richard Subber | Apr 16, 2026 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature, Reflections
give your arm to a loved one…
Book review:
The Gifts of Imperfection:
Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be
and Embrace Who You Are
by Dr. C. Brené Brown (b1965)
Center City, MN: Hazelden, 2010
135 pages
Dr. Brown offers this “tough lesson” from her life:
“How much we know and understand ourselves is critically important,
but there is something that is even more essential
to living a Wholehearted life: loving ourselves.”
This book moved me to think about changing the way I think about life, and my life.
Give yourself a gift: take time to read The Gifts of Imperfection and then D.I.G. into your life.
That is, start consciously thinking about wholehearted living and tell yourself a lot of truth, and then:
Get Deliberate about doing the right things for you, in all your glorious imperfections,
Get Inspired to acknowledge what you’re doing in all your loving relationships, and
Get Going, take the next steps in actually living a love affair with yourself and all you can be…
…and don’t mind if you stumble now and then, and give your arm to a loved one now and then…
…and have good intentions, and take the agony and the ecstasy as they come.
Quote is from The Gifts of Imperfection, p. xi.
* * * * * *
Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2026 All rights reserved.
Book review: Colonial America
A Very Short Introduction
by Alan Taylor
–
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”
* * * * * *
by Richard Subber | Apr 12, 2026 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Joys of reading
This is good storytelling
Book review:
The Brothers
by Janet M. Kovarik
2014
If you’re a student of the Civil War, you’ll recognize the actual historical figures who are part of the story, and you’ll quickly feel comfortably familiar with Stu and Beau and Sarah and their families, because they embody some of the compelling human agents of the wartime drama.
These characters are three-dimensional. There is human urgency in their speech and actions. These are cerebral characters who are articulately reflective, thoughtful about their circumstances and their life journeys, and passionate about love and rectitude and their personal legacies and futures.
The Brothers is the first novel in The McCullough Saga. The twins, Beau and Stu, have explicitly distinct personalities but their lives have remarkably similar if unconventional trajectories. They are the central figures in a human story, on a human scale, with a conspicuously realistic historical setting. Storm Haven, their deep South plantation, is convincingly researched, as are the gritty battle scenes, the economics and logistics of the war, the arduous success of the Underground Railroad and the delights of antebellum southern cuisine.
The Brothers is a dialogue-rich offering of historical fiction. I’m a dialogue fan. This is good storytelling.
* * * * * *
Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2026 All rights reserved.
The Bridges of Madison County
book/movie review
If you’re looking for highly stoked eroticism,
look elsewhere.
–
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”
* * * * * *
by Richard Subber | Apr 9, 2026 | Joys of reading, Language, Reviews of other poets
I’m open to being tantalized…
“We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men”
from “The Hollow Men,” 1925, by T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965)
American-British writer, popularly acclaimed as a great poet of the 20th century
At long last, I’ve tried T. S. Eliot’s poetry.
I respectfully think that T. S. Eliot’s poetry is a bloomin’ wasteland…
Maybe I’ll put Collected Poems of T. S. Eliot back on the shelf, and try again after a while.
Maybe not.
It’s not that I mind Eliot’s deliberate contradictions so much. I’m willing to be provoked. I’m open to being tantalized. I’m ready to be pushed or pulled outside my comfort zone.
The sticky point for me, with Eliot’s poetry, is that I never seem to get to the point, or maybe I simply don’t get the point. When I get to the end of one of his longish poems, I’m really not sure where I started, or where I wandered, or where I arrived.
I find little coherence in Eliot’s words and phrases and passages.
I think of myself as a wordsmith, and I love the beauty of elegant phrases and shimmering, specific, steely, selective, stately, splendid words that tell a delicious story or evoke a bloom of emotion.
For my taste, T. S. Eliot’s poetry isn’t tasty, and it’s a bloomin’ wasteland of jumbled words, fractured images, and unfinished imaginations.
If you’re wondering where all the flowers have gone, don’t look for answers in Eliot’s work.
Source: T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems of T. S. Eliot (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1958), 101.
* * * * * *
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2026 All rights reserved.
“Fishering,” by Brian Doyle
…what meets the eye…
–
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”
* * * * * *
by Richard Subber | Mar 31, 2026 | American history, Books, History, Human Nature, Politics, Power and inequality, World history
guns and germs…
Book review:
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
by Charles Mann
New York: Vintage Books, 2011
553 pages
Everything you never knew about civilized people in the Americas before the Europeans arrived and killed most of them (OK, many died in battle, but it was European diseases, mostly). Maybe close to 100 million “native” people died within 100 years or so of the “discovery” by Columbus…but hold on, this book is not about Wounded Knee-type criticism or ex post facto self-flagellation.
In 1491, Mann beautifully describes the marvelous sophistication of cultures, cities, agriculture, arts and science that blossomed in North America, Central America, and South America thousands of years ago, in many cases predating achievements and growth and civilization in Europe. Yes, the Incas never used the wheel except for children’s toys. And yes, the Mississippian city of Cahokia was a bustling port and a trading center with population equal to Paris in France—and that was 500 years before Columbus sailed.
And yes, there were grand cities (e.g., Cahokia) in the Americas before there was pyramid-building in Egypt. And yes, the Olmec culture in what is now Mexico invented the zero whole centuries before mathematicians in India did the same.
My recollection of schoolboy learning about the history of the Americas is that the dates and events were tied to discovery and conquest and colonization by Europeans. The implication was that, before the white men with guns, germs, and steel arrived, nothing much was going on in whole continents characterized more by “virgin land” and “endless wilderness” than by people who had agriculture, city life, art, trade, commerce, religion, science, kings, and philosophers.
Mann offers 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. For me, the joy of reading this book is learning about the multiplicity of cultures that flourished in the Americas, and learning how they tamed and managed and very greenly conserved their environment…and for me, the sad revelation of this book is understanding that the peoples of the Americas were human beings whose achievements were noble and notable, and yet, lamentably, their cultural legacies are largely lost and the losses are barely mourned.
In 1533 Pizarro and his conquistadors at Cuzco precipitated the decline of the 300-year-old Inca empire in Peru. Fifty years later, the Spanish colonial administrators in Peru ordered the burning of all the Incan “khipu” knotted string records because they were “idolatrous objects.” Khipu were the Incas’ only form of writing. The smoke from the burning of their books gets in your eyes, forever and ever.
* * * * * *
Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2026 All rights reserved.
Book review: Shantung Compound
They didn’t care much
about each other…
by Langdon Gilkey
–
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”
* * * * * *
