by Richard Subber | Sep 9, 2025 | Human Nature, Joys of reading, Tidbits
goal-oriented…
A little girl was diligently pounding away
on her grandfather’s typewriter.
She told him she was writing a story.
“What’s it about?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she replied, “I can’t read.”
When you want to do something,
don’t let most things stop you.
Thanks to my friend George.
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Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Myths of Tet
How people get killed by lies…
by Edwin E. Moïse
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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 | Sep 4, 2025 | Book reviews, Books, Language, Poetry, Reviews of other poets
…of pears and bears…
Book review:
Traveling Light: Collected and New Poems
by David Russell Wagoner (1926-2021)
A prolific American writer, poet, novelist
It’s a pleasure to recommend Traveling Light. Wagoner has some heavy duty poetry chops.
Any serious poet can learn from his examples. Repeatedly, as I read through Traveling Light, I wanted to pick up my pen and grab a piece of paper and try my hand at writing the images he sees.
Readers, dig in! Wagoner finds the right words for those feelings, those realities that you didn’t imagine before you read his intuitions…
…such as, feeding a whole sack of fresh pears to a camel in the zoo:
“…She watched me disappear,
Then with a rippling trudge went back to her stable
To snort, to browse on hay, to remember my sack forever.
She’d been used to having no pears, but hadn’t known it…”
…such as, on meeting a bear in the bear’s own woods:
“…Withdraw without turning and start saying
Softly, monotonously, whatever comes to mind
Without special pleading:
Nothing hurt or reproachful to appeal to his better feelings.
He has none, only a harder life than yours…”
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Poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
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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 | Aug 31, 2025 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature, Joys of reading, Language
prime times of life…
Book review:
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
by Muriel Spark (1918-2006)
New York: Harper Perennial, 1961, 1994
187 pages
Miss Jean Brodie, an exceedingly unconventional teacher, described every part of her life and her commitments and her outlook as being “in my prime,” but it is a hallmark of Muriel Spark’s magnificent talent in assembling the best words that it is left to the reader to completely imagine what “prime” may mean.
The defining value of the novel is the unceasing willingness and undaunted desire of Brodie’s carefully chosen students—the girls in the “Brodie set”—to try to figure out what “prime” means and to try to understand the effects their teacher is having on them.
The pages are filled with interactions and misunderstandings and hormonal energies. Miss Brodie and the other grownups dramatically pursue their teaching roles, but the girls largely find their own ways to learn things and work at growing up while doing so.
The book ends but the story doesn’t end. Henry Adams said a teacher can never tell “where (her) influence stops.” The ultimately humiliated Miss Brodie dies, but her prime has no boundaries and her students make their own lives.
p.s. the acclaimed movie with the same name and Maggie Smith as Miss Brodie is first class entertainment, but it mostly ignores Muriel Spark’s grimly realistic portrayal of the life forces that animate the “Brodie set.”
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My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Proud Tower
…a lot more than a history book…
by Barbara Tuchman
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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 | Aug 19, 2025 | Book reviews, Books, History, Human Nature, World history
the not so “Dark Ages”
Book review:
The Bright Ages:
A New History of Medieval Europe
by Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry
New York: HarperCollins, 2021
Gabriele and Perry offer quite a few things you never knew about the so-called “Dark Ages.”
The Bright Ages lays out an alternative view: life went on after the “sack” of Rome in 410 CE.
Various regional rulers and peoples continued to call themselves Romans for hundreds of years.
There was some beauty in the “Dark Ages.”
Human frailties were in full force before, during, and after the “Dark Ages.”
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Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Financier
Theodore Dreiser’s villain…
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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 | Aug 14, 2025 | Book reviews, Books
mere talk of love
Book review:
Washington Square
by Henry James (1843-1916)
New York: Doric Books, 1950
214 pages
Washington Square was written in 1880, depicting high society life in New York City in the 1840s and 1850s
Washington Square is a shallow dive into the meaning and the eternities of love.
Henry James offers 214 pages of sometimes desultory talk about love, and a couple kisses, and a touch—not an embrace—or two, and Catherine and Morris talk at each other about their concepts of love, but there are no awakenings, and no whispers melting on lips, and no warm zephyrs that fill the emptied spaces.
After Catherine and Morris have grudged their final words, Morris stomps away with his hat jammed on, Catherine returns to her knitting, and the reader is abandoned, adrift, still waiting to be filled by demonstrations of dearest love.
Henry James is a wordsmith, no dispute about that. The reader learns endearing and vastly frightening elements of the characters of the alleged lovers, and her curiously and completely unlikeable father, and Mrs. Penniman, the aunt who won’t butt out.
Henry James chases a plot, but doesn’t get his net around one.
The story line, for my taste, never ceases to be a prelude. There is no rip and no snorting in the pretend climax, and no satisfaction in the ersatz denouement.
If you want to argue that this presumed love story never gets started, and doesn’t really end, you get no argument from me.
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Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
The Visible Hand:
The Managerial Revolution in American Business (book review)
no managers in olden times…
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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 | Aug 7, 2025 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature
…how to spot the howlers…
Book review:
Liespotting:
Proven Techniques to Detect Deception
by Pamela Meyer
New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2010
236 pages
Pamela Meyer says the average person encounters a lie almost 200 times a day. Wow.
Seems like it’s a good bet that you’ve told a lie in the last few hours.
Liespotting is a how-to book—not how to tell a lie, but how to read the clues when someone isn’t telling you the truth.
It turns out that it’s real hard to lie without some part of your body giving you away. Your face, your tone of voice, your word choices, your syntax, your shoulders, your feet, you name it…
Meyer offers plenty of bullet point reminders about how to spot the howlers, the white lies, and the tells when you’re in the middle of an important negotiation.
Honestly, that’s what that lady said, I think.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
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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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