by Richard Subber | Jan 9, 2024 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature, Joys of reading
a sustaining emotional roadmap…
Book review:
The Woman at the Washington Zoo:
Writings on Politics, Family, and Fate
by Marjorie Williams (1958-2005)
Timothy Noah, ed.
New York: PublicAffairs, Perseus Books Group, 2005
358 pages
I wish I had known about Marjorie Williams’ work when she was an active staff writer at The Washington Post.
She had a pungent, penetrating style, and she carefully offered reasoned judgment as well as what we can nostalgically think of today as “facts.”
In The Woman at the Washington Zoo, her personal memoirs about her life and her cancer are wholly human, and they remain as a sustaining emotional roadmap for an engaged reader.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
“…and dipped in folly…”
only Poe knows how to say it…
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 | Dec 24, 2023 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History
strange men are shooting…
Book review:
The Diary of a Lady of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
From June 15 to July 15, 1863
by Pennsylvania Lady of Gettysburg
Ithaca, NY: The Cornell University Library Digital Collections, 2023
29 pages
There is not much fireworks in The Diary of a Lady of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
Rather, this largely muted account of a civilian lady in Gettysburg during the famous battle is a compelling tribute to the civilians and combatants who unhappily endured the terrible fighting and killing that could have effectively ended the American Civil War, but didn’t.
A devastating insight into the civilians’ stress and suffering is this: during most of the battle, they really didn’t know very much about what was going on. The civilians who stayed in the town (most of them) repeatedly hunkered down in their cellars and waited until the artillery bombardments ceased. The civilians repeatedly talked with both Union and Confederate soldiers who were in or moving through the town. The civilians, in the main, tried to care for the wounded men of both sides who happened to be nearby.
The battle of Gettysburg was terrifying for the civilian residents of the town, and, luckily for them, it didn’t last too long.
Try to imagine hiding in your house for four or five days, desperately wondering what’s going on, while strange men are walking and running through the streets, shooting at everything, and cannon balls are hitting buildings every so often.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Sea Runners
…it informs, it does not soar…
by Ivan Doig
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 | Dec 16, 2023 | Book reviews, Books, Joys of reading, Language
…think “Larry McMurtry”
Book review:
The View from the Cheap Seats
by Neil Gaiman (b1960)
New York: William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 2016
522 pages
I realize it’s a bit outré to mention that I recently “discovered” the very satisfying writing style of Neil Gaiman.
Gaiman writes with panache about Edgar Allen Poe, Rudyard Kipling’s horror (!) stories, Dracula, and more.
I’ve read The View from the Cheap Seats and loved it!
The “Four Bookshops” piece is rare earth for me. Reading Gaiman is giving me flavor and overtones of reading Larry McMurtry (viz., Literary Life: A Second Memoir).
Gaiman recounts this anecdote:
“Albert Einstein was asked once how we could make our children intelligent. His reply was both simple and wise. ‘If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” (15)
Gaiman also says “There’s a brotherhood of people who read and who care about books.” (29) He’s one of those folks, and so am I.
….viz., Fahrenheit 451
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
“…and dipped in folly…”
only Poe knows how to say it…
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”
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by Richard Subber | Dec 12, 2023 | Book reviews, Books, Joys of reading, Reflections
be a willing reader…
Book review:
The Elegance of the Hedgehog
by Muriel Barbery
Alison Anderson, trans.
New York: Europa Editions, 2006
325 pages
The Elegance of the Hedgehog is a logophile’s book.
Really.
If you can read this book without keeping your dictionary close at hand, I want to shake your hand.
Barbery has written a stunning first-person interaction of two characters who could easily be separate books. (Distinguishing fonts makes it easy to know who’s talking.)
The Hedgehog is Renée Michel, an almost unflappable and serenely superior person who pretends to be a simple old concierge in a building almost filled with rich folks who don’t care what she thinks about. She thinks about plenty that would never occur to them.
The second primary persona is Paloma, a barely-out-of-her-tweens girl who thinks she wants to commit suicide but lives an overwhelmingly fantastic life in her head and becomes Renée’s friend.
The Elegance of the Hedgehog is a literate, penetrating, philosophical, compassionate revelation of two great minds who connect and spiral into ever more fancies for the willing reader’s delight.
Be a willing reader.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Girl at the Lion d’Or
Sebastian Faulks is tenaciously literate,
richly Gallic…
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 | Nov 28, 2023 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, World history
women did most of the work…
Book review:
Code Girls:
The Untold Story
of the American Women Code Breakers
of World War II
by Liza Mundy
New York: Hachette Books, 2017
416 pages
It’s a fascinating and inspiring story about World War II.
Incredibly talented code breakers—most of them women—significantly helped to win the war by breaking German, Japanese, Italian, and many other wartime codes, and supplying urgently timely information to Allied forces, and significantly helping to save Allied lives.
No one knows how many Allied fighting men and women, and civilians, survived the war because of the “code girls.”
Code Girls has enough about the esoterica of code breaking to satisfy the most knowledgeable fan, but not so much that it will stupefy a typical reader of history.
For my taste, Mundy tells a bit too much of the untold story. After I got into the book, I started to feel like I didn’t need to know any more about bunches of “code girls” sharing a bathroom in a crowded wartime boarding house in Washington, D.C.
p.s. I’m searching for a book about the code breakers on the other side.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
Does the public want public interest news?
Is it news to you?
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 | Nov 23, 2023 | Book reviews, Books, Poetry, Reviews of other poets
her words are arrows…
Book review:
Evidence
by Mary Oliver (1935-2019)
Boston: Beacon Press, 2009
74 pages
Guilty, guilty, guilty. With Evidence, Mary Oliver is guilty once again of nailing me to the floor so I can read every single poem in her book, one after the other.
Her style encourages me to think that I can write more and better poetry, because she makes it seem so easy to choose the right words, in the right order. Mary speaks straight from her heart, she uses exacting words as arrows to find precise targets in vision and imagination, and she leaves out all the other stuff.
Despite the mountain of her years, we have Evidence: Mary Oliver climbed to the highest branches. Here’s an excerpt from “About Angels and About Trees”:
“…what I know is that
they rest, sometimes,
in the tops of the trees
and you can see them,
or almost see them,
or, anyway, think: what a
wonderful idea…
The trees, anyway, are
miraculous, full of
angels…and certainly
ready to be
the resting place of
strange, winged creatures
that we, in this world, have loved.”
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
“Boil up” and other good manners…
The “Hobo Ethical Code” is worth a quick read.
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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