by Richard Subber | Aug 4, 2026 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Politics, Power and inequality
too many Americans died…
Book review:
The Premonition: A Pandemic Story
by Michael Lewis
New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2021
The Premonition is the compelling work by Michael Lewis (of The Big Short fame).
You’ll recognize the narrative nonfiction style—this is the Michael Lewis stuff you love to read.
The Premonition is a fully frightening account of the deadly inability of the Trump government (including the CDC) and corporate America to deal effectively with the COVID-19 pandemic that killed more than 1.2 million Americans. Too many Americans died because Trump and his lackies and the private sector wouldn’t try to do what they were responsible to do.
Lewis won’t make you feel good about the institutions of American national government and the so-called capitalist system.
He is eminently clear, and relentlessly anecdotal.
Michael Lewis never met an anecdote that wasn’t worth repeating.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2026 All rights reserved.
Book review: Shawshank Redemption
A world I do not want to know…
by Stephen King
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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 16, 2026 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature, Reflections
it’s not the last obscenity…
Book review:
Aging: An Apprenticeship
Nan Narboe, ed.
Portland, OR: Red Notebook Press, 2018
286 pages
Narboe created a handy and wide-ranging collection of reflections on the art, science, and humanity of the aging process. More than 50 authors tell it like they think it is, for folks nearing the increasingly ordinary age of 50, and for folks in their 50s, 60s, 70s , 80s, and 90s and beyond. If you’re not in one of those groups, you will be sooner than you think.
Of course, the explicit premise of most of the authors in Aging: An Apprenticeship is that life can be good (or not), aging happens to everyone, and dying is the end game.
Gloria Steinem’s contribution is on point, completely tolerable, and instructive. She says:
“After all, we are communal creatures
who must mirror each other to know who we are.
Every living thing ages and dies,
yet humans seem to be the only species
that thinks about aging and thinks about dying.
Surely, we are meant to use this ability,
especially in a country
that suffers so much from concealing aging and dying
as if they were the last obscenities.”
For Aging: An Apprenticeship, Narboe has collected essays that range from whimsical to doggone serious. Each author offers a very personal argument that aging and dying are 100% natural.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2026 All rights reserved.
A quote from General Custer
Hint: something to do with Indians…
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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 | Jul 9, 2026 | Books, Politics, Power and inequality
the right way to get down to business…
Book review:
Managing in the Next Society
by Peter F. Drucker (1909-2005), management guru
New York: Truman Talley Books, St. Martin’s Press, 2002
I love reading Drucker.
He is a deliberately perceptive and honest observer of management and the corporate world.
It’s too bad he’s not alive today to take a good look at men and women of business, and their businesses.
Drucker had many compelling insights about how to manage people and operations in a world that he assumed, de facto, was mostly populated by people who mostly want to do the right thing.
Too bad that’s not the world we live in.
Reading Drucker is an afternoon delight—that’s about how long it lasts.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2026 All rights reserved.
84, Charing Cross Road (book review)
Helene Hanff, on reading good books…
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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 | Jul 4, 2026 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Poetry
the new railroads carried books west…
Book review:
Literary Publishing in America: 1790-1850
by William Charvat
Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959
William Charvat offers, probably, more appealing detail than you ever imagined about American novels, short stories, and poems around the turn of the 19th century.
Writing was then, as it is now, a tough business for writers and publishers. Literary Publishing in America confirms that most writers didn’t get rich, and more than a few publishers managed to turn a really good buck.
In America, the market-expanding extension of railroads westward from the east coast had a lot to do with publishing success and the evolution of American reading taste.
Hint: the inland readers largely went for the romance-based novels, trashy and otherwise.
Hint: poetry has always been a tough slog for poets—ain’t much money in it.
Hint: history, and a historical context, were significantly important in the formation of the reading public’s taste for fiction.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2026 All rights reserved.
The Collected Poems of Sara Teasdale…book review
Literate, but impersonal
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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 | Jul 2, 2026 | Joys of reading, My poetry, Poetry
try again
hot
The star of day,
it sears the sky,
it turns away
my faltering eye,
yet it compels another try,
I know of course it cannot stay,
it fades so soon in climbing high.
April 12, 2026
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My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2026 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Comanche Empire
the other story of the American West…
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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”
Your comments are welcome—tell me what you’re thinking.
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by Richard Subber | Jun 23, 2026 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History
upright folks made the start
Book review:
One Small Candle
by Thomas J. Fleming (1927-2017)
New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1964
222 pages
Wow! One Small Candle is a satisfyingly readable, confidently written, fully researched book about the terrifyingly precarious lives of the Mayflower crew and passengers in 1620. You didn’t want to be there. So many of them died at sea or too soon after they landed at Plymouth Bay.
Fleming just tells it like it was. For long times, they had too little food and drink, couldn’t wash, couldn’t change their clothes , and watched their sick family members and friends die because nothing could be done to help them.
Think about living for weeks in a small house with unthinkably low ceilings and no bathrooms and 100 other people. Even if you like the other people, that ain’t fun.
I don’t want to gloss over this part: Fleming makes the common mistake of calling the native inhabitants “savages.” They weren’t “savages.” They weren’t Europeans, of course. They were among millions who lived in and civilized North America for thousands of years before the Europeans “discovered” it.
They Mayflower passengers were an upright mix of dedicated religious folk and mostly hearty adventurers. Many of them gave their lives in their quest to build new lives at Plymouth. They struggled mightily to light one small candle, and sometimes they happily sang around the candle. Their candle burns still, and we have to be careful that we don’t snuff it out.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2026 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Sea Runners
…it informs, it does not soar…
by Ivan Doig
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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”
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