by Richard Subber | Jan 11, 2023 | Books, Reflections, Tidbits
“The beginning is always today.”
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851)
Today started when you woke up. Think about beginnings.
Thanks to my trusted advisor for this one.
Shelley wrote Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), and by the way, if you’ve only watched the movie, you don’t know the Frankenstein story. Read the book.
* * * * * *
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
–
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 | Jan 6, 2023 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature
television is entertainment at its worst
Book review:
Amusing Ourselves to Death:
Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
by Neil Postman (1931-2003)
New York: Elisabeth Sifton Books/Viking, 1985
184 pages
This is a rare treasure—a can’t-put-it-down kind of book.
I wish I’d read it 40 years ago.
Amusing Ourselves to Death is a 184-page drumbeat of insight and reality about the devastating impact of television on our culture and our prospects of living the good life.
Postman, a media theorist and cultural critic, says television “is a medium which presents information in a form that renders it simplistic, nonsubstantive, nonhistorical and noncontextual; that is to say, information packaged as entertainment.” (p. 141)
He wrote the book before the internet got really started, and before the enhanced horrors of social media like Facebook and Twitter and TikTok.
He continued to write about the failures of our educational enterprises and the negative impacts of technology on our culture.
Don’t let Amusing Ourselves to Death be the only Postman book you read in the near future.
* * * * * *
Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 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”
* * * * * *
by Richard Subber | Dec 26, 2022 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Politics, Power and inequality
money did a lot of the talking…
Book review:
The Founders’ Fortunes:
How Money Shaped the Birth of America
by Willard Sterne Randall
New York: Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2022
324 pages
Randall offers details about the wealth—and intermittent lack thereof—of a number of the so-called “Founding Fathers,” and how persistently those men looked out for their own financial interests throughout the Revolutionary era.
Presumptively you aren’t surprised to learn about these details.
There’s plenty more to learn when you read The Founders’ Fortunes.
The matter-of-fact point is that these men were looking out for themselves at the same time that they were creating the independent United States of America. Are you shocked?
* * * * * *
Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2022 All rights reserved.
Book review: An Empire Divided
King George III and his ministers
wanted the Caribbean sugar islands
a lot more than they wanted the 13 colonies…
by Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy
–
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”
* * * * * *
by Richard Subber | Dec 19, 2022 | American history, Book reviews, Books, Democracy, History, Politics, Power and inequality
violence shut down the “Reconstruction”
Book review:
Splendid Failure:
Postwar Reconstruction in the American South
by Michael W. Fitzgerald (b1956)
Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2007
234 pages
Splendid Failure offers a shockingly realistic account of the so-called “Reconstruction” period after the Civil War. There was a lot more violence, much earlier in the time frame, than you probably know about.
The violence throughout the South was not successfully resisted by Northern forces after the war, and after the presidential election dispute of 1876, the Northern watchdogs withdrew their concern. Commercial and political interests asserted their primacy in the North.
Fitzgerald observes: “At the national level the Republicans were the party of economic growth” (p. 100).
The white elites who held the economic and political power in the South before the war basically regained their economic and political power after the brief period of nominally reformative so-called “Reconstruction.”
As we now know, the war and the so-called “Emancipation Proclamation” weren’t the end of the story.
* * * * * *
Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2022 All rights reserved.
–
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”
* * * * * *
by Richard Subber | Dec 11, 2022 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Politics, Power and inequality
the former slaves were forgotten in the North…
Book review:
Reconstruction After the Civil War
by John Hope Franklin
Eric Foner, foreword
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 3rd edit., 1961, repr. 2013
Franklin changed the viewpoint of professional historians about the goals and failures of the Radical Republicans’ policies on “reconstruction” of the Confederate states after the American Civil War.
In the past historians reported the Reconstruction period as a politically motivated effort by Northern politicians to control the Southern states, with sometimes superficial attention to the concept and the abandonment of effectively giving millions of black Americans the right to vote.
Franklin’s thesis, in simplistic terms, is that contending political and business interests tried to pursue “reconstruction” to develop the economic capacity of the South, and the plight of freed slaves gradually slipped from the center of attention. The white folks who were leaders of the secession rather quickly resumed their control of the Southern states.
* * * * * *
Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2022 All rights reserved.
Book review: Saint Joan
by George Bernard Shaw
–
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”
* * * * * *
by Richard Subber | Nov 25, 2022 | American history, Book reviews, Books, Democracy, History, Politics, Power and inequality
the many meanings of “shareholder value”…
Book review:
The Man Who Broke Capitalism:
How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland
and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—
and How to Undo His Legacy
by David Gelles
New York: Simon & Schuster, 2022
264 pages
Gelles has written a dreadfully important expose of the evolution of the disastrous idolatry of “maximizing shareholder value” and funneling more and more of America’s corporate wealth to the relatively small cadre of executives and directors and financiers who took advantage of it to line their own pockets and deny economic success to just about everyone else.
Of course, Gelles doesn’t say that Jack Welch was the only one who did it. For my taste, the title of the book is a distraction from the truth: America’s financial elite have misappropriated the industrial wealth of the country.
The Man Who Broke Capitalism concludes with a broadly detailed array of governmental policies that would remediate the disaster that Jack Welch and the Chicago school of economists and so many others created to be a substitute for the notion that a corporation is a creature of our society, and is best understood as a conduit for creating goods, creating wealth, and widely distributing both.
* * * * * *
Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2022 All rights reserved.
Book review: Ethan Frome
it’s about not being satisfied with less…
by Edith Wharton
–
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”
* * * * * *
