by Richard Subber | Mar 9, 2024 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature, Joys of reading, Language
the good old way…
Book review:
Scaramouche
Rafael Sabatini (1875-1950)
New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1921
392 pages
These people talk to each other. It’s face-to-face communications. They pay attention to body language and what you do with your face.
Scaramouche ends the way you think it’s going to end: boy gets girl.
But there’s a lot of road to travel before we get to that ending—I think there’s only one reference to a heaving bosom—there is fastidious bad language, and lots of casual use of Latin—there’s a lot of hand kissing, which is something we could do more of these days.
Sabatini was a prolific writer and he wrote this romance novel the way it should be written. The reader gets an eyeful and an earful and a heartful of genuine romance, with all the words that make it work.
It’s still possible to make love in the good old way they did it in the 18th century. Read all about it.
* * * * * *
Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
The Scarlet Letter, victim of Hollywood
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s version is best
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”
* * * * * *
by Richard Subber | Mar 5, 2024 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature
don’t think about John of Arc
Book review:
Saint Joan
by Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, copyright 1924, rep. 1964
159 pages
Imagine that Joan of Arc had been John of Arc.
I’m no fan of “what if” history, but I dare to say that John might have become a saint without the burned-at-the-stake part.
Saint Joan is a play, so if stage directions are a distraction to you, you can just pretend that Shaw is whispering in your ear.
Shaw’s 42-page preface is historical treasure added to the literary treasure. He offers even more than you imagine about the life and context and historical significance of la pucelle de Domrémy.
All of the men whose lives she crossed accepted Joan’s exceptionalism. Many believed her story about hearing voices from the saints and from God.
Joan went to the fire without understanding that the kings and the generals wished that she had never been born.
* * * * * *
Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Bridges of Madison County
If you’re looking for
highly stoked eroticism
and high-rolling lives
that throw off sparks when they touch,
look elsewhere.
by Robert Waller
–
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 | Feb 22, 2024 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature
to each his or her own…
Book review:
On Chesil Beach
by Ian McEwan (b1948)
New York: Nan A. Talese, Doubleday, 2007
203 pages
Most likely you will find yourself undeniably drawn to keep turning the pages of On Chesil Beach.
It’s a quiet book, but it’s loaded with exotically passionate words and moments and discoveries about the very private concepts of love that Edward and Florence bring to their marriage in 1962.
There is almost none of the heaving bosom stuff that corrupts so many tales about love, and the language is realistic, almost chaste.
Ian McEwan lets the two lovers try to talk to each other about stuff that they deeply feel but for which they hardly know the words.
There is a sad, and sadly understandable, ending.
* * * * * *
Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Financier
Theodore Dreiser’s villain…
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”
* * * * * *
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.
* * * * * *
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”
* * * * * *
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.”
* * * * * *
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”
* * * * * *
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.
* * * * * *
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”
* * * * * *
