by Richard Subber | Feb 18, 2024 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature
a real good story…
Book review:
The Fountainhead
by Ayn Rand (1905-1982)
Indianapolis, IN: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1943
754 pages
You already know something about what The Fountainhead is all about, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this review.
Here’s my contribution: think of The Fountainhead as a novel, as a love story, as a heroic fable, as a celebration of human virtue and the urge to do the right thing. Think about that moralistic gem from Hamlet: “To thine own self be true.”
The Fountainhead is an elaboration of Ayn Rand’s imagination about ambition, self-actualization, courage, endurance, and a kind of love that needs more marshmallows and less of the kind of talk that you wouldn’t expect to hear in the library stacks.
It’s a real good story. Roark, Dominique, and a couple other characters aren’t sketched, they’re lushly painted with many words that you don’t hear in ordinary conversation.
Forget about the political claptrap that’s bandied about using a rubric of “Ayn Rand’s philosophy.”
She was a novelist first, and her talent ran dry when she stepped out of the literary sphere.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
The Unknown American Revolution (book review)
in the streets, says Gary Nash
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 10, 2024 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature
aspirations, vagrant needs…
Book review:
The Paris Wife
by Paula McLain
New York: Ballantine Books, 2011
320 pages
Paula McLain has done it artfully. The Paris Wife is a richly nuanced account of the transformation of the 1921 marriage of Hadley Richardson and Ernest Hemingway, the first for each of them.
I had not known in detail that Hemingway was as much of an inconstant lover as he actually was.
Now I know that Paula McLain tells me as much as I need to know about the life-interrupting aspirations of Hadley, and more than I care to know about the destructive potency of Hemingway’s vagrant needs.
Excerpt (Hadley is speaking):
“[Ernest] needed me to make him feel safe…yes, the same way I needed him. But he also liked that he could disappear into his work, away from me. And return when he wanted to.”
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
Remember the Tallahatchie Bridge?
Molly Johnson sings it right…
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 | Feb 6, 2024 | Book reviews, Books, History, Human Nature, World history
the byways of evolution…
Book review:
Cave of Bones
by Lee Berger and John Hawks
Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2023
235 pages
We haven’t been alone since forever, more or less.
It’s way too easy to adopt the common misunderstanding that humans are soooo exceptional, uniquely better than all the other animals.
The emphasis is on “unique,” at the apex of a singular progression throughout all of our history.
It ain’t necessarily so.
Cave of Bones is full of countervailing evidence: Homo naledi in south Africa were building fires, burying their dead, and scratching lines on cave walls at about the same time—200,000 to 300,000 years ago—as early members of Homo sapiens were doing the same things.
Paleoanthropologist Lee Berger affirms that Homo naledi didn’t look like us, and were a separate species and “by almost any definition…not human.” Nevertheless, in the Rising Star cave system he and his team members found charcoal and armfuls of fossil bones and scratch marks and a rock shaped like a tool, all confirming that naledi left evidence of their human-like activities, and, yes, culture.
In his introduction, Berger confides a sobering reality: “We explore the places where things have died.” I’m glad I didn’t do that in my career work.
Read Cave of Bones cover to cover. Learn some interesting stuff.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
Book review: Lafayette by Harlow Unger
He was a great man. Also rich and lucky.
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 | Jan 25, 2024 | Book reviews, Books, Poetry
…less than meets the eye…
Book review:
The Rubayyat of Omar Khayyam
Edward Fitzgerald, trans.
Manoocher Aryanpur, intro.
Joseph Isom, illus.
Kansas City, MO: Hallmark Cards, Inc. 1967
59 pages
Overall, Omar Khayyam’s classic doesn’t appeal to my modern ear. It’s too long, and disorganized.
Having said that, I’m happy to acknowledge that a reader can find poetic beauty and exotic imagery seeded throughout the poem, e.g. “…There was the Door to which I found no Key/There was the Veil through which I could not see:/Some little talk awhile of Me and Thee/There was—and then no more of Thee and Me.” (Stanza XXXIII)
No one will confuse the Rubayyat with Mary Oliver’s work.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
Home Team: Poems About Baseball (book review)
Edwin Romond hits another homer…
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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 21, 2024 | American history, Book reviews, Books, Democracy, History, Politics, Power and inequality
Popular history: not exactly true…
Book review:
Origins of Modern America, 1860-1900
Allen Weinstein, ed.
Vol. 4 of Random House Readings in American History
New York: Random House, 1970
216 pages
Contains 10 essay-length segments addressing three themes: Civil War and Its
Aftermath, The New Society, and The Approach of Empire
The four decades that started with the American Civil War were a continuing tempest of change in every aspect of American life.
Origins of Modern America, 1860-1900 is a compact collection of 10 essays that will open your eyes to the significant currents and eddies in the great waves of transformation that marked the end of America’s first complete century. A lot of it wasn’t pretty.
Authors like Alfred D. Chandler Jr. and Stephan Thernstrom take a deep look at many iconic elements in the periods of American history that traditionally have been labeled as the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Gilded Age. These essays were written in the middle of the 20th century, and these historians offer careful looks at many widely-held truisms that are not, in fact, wholly or even substantially true.
For example, Thernstrom examines “Urbanization, Migration, and Social Mobility in Late Nineteenth-Century America.” He gives evidence of several nuances and some inaccuracies in the concept of the development of a beleaguered, largely immigrant working class as industrialization burgeoned in the United States.
A large component of the working class were young American boys and girls who moved east to get off their parents’ failing farms. The political empowerment of the working class was muted and delayed in America (in contrast to the more volatile emergence of socialist activism in Europe) because so many of the blue collar workers were persistently transient—they didn’t stay in one job or place long enough to develop coherent political consciousness and clout.
Thernstrom starkly notes that “Lowell [a factory town] was terrible,” but for many European immigrants and Kansas farm boys the factory job and the tenement life were an improvement in their prospects for a tolerable life.
Organizing for worker’s rights was a tough proposition, and the wealthy factory owners and industry barons used their dominant power to resist it:
“In 1875, the Superintendent of one of Andrew Carnegie’s steel mills summed up his experience this way: ‘We must steer clear as far as we can of Englishmen, who are great sticklers for high wages, small production and strikes. My experience has shown that Germans and Irish, Swedes and what I denominate “Buckwheats”—young American country boys, judiciously mixed, make the most honest and tractable force you can find.’ ” (p. 149)
Indeed, there are many varieties of the American dream, all depending on your point of view.
Origins of Modern America offers good learning in compact, complementary, and compelling essays.
It will almost certainly change your mind about some key elements of American history
that you’ve always known to be true…
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
Home Team: Poems About Baseball (book review)
Edwin Romond hits another homer…
–
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 | Jan 13, 2024 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature, Joys of reading
“She Who Must Be Obeyed”
Book review:
She
by H. Rider Haggard (1856-1925)
New York: Books, Inc., 1930
first published 1887
384 pages
She is an adventure story that Indiana Jones never imagined.
Most of the action is in an unknowable part of Africa. The protagonist is a 2,000-year-old lady—“She Who Must Be Obeyed”—who is beautiful beyond understanding, all too aware of her great powers, and indefatigably committed to getting what she wants.
She is not a very lovable character, but every man who sees her falls in love with her.
Haggard has created ripe ritual, grand history, a fantastic walkabout, and dabbles of credibility in this incredibly enticing story.
If you even suspect that you might get bored while reading She, you’ve got another think coming.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
Book review: Ethan Frome
not being satisfied with less…
by Edith Wharton
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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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