by Richard Subber | Sep 20, 2026 | History, Theater and play reviews, World history
from the heart, a patriot
Movie review:
Darkest Hour
Gary Oldman was 59 years old when he won an Oscar (Best Actor) for giving us a completely believable Winston Churchill who decided in June 1940 to fight Hitler instead of settling for a completely risky peace agreement.
Darkest Hour (2019, rated PG-13, 125 minutes) is a gem. Oldman is Churchill: overweight, jowly, devotee of long cigars and whiskey, imperious, meekly in love with Clementine (he called her “Clemmie,” she called him “Pig”), a flamboyant patriot, and wartime leader.
Churchill was a career politician, of course, and Oldman deftly portrays his Machiavellian strengths and weaknesses.
Churchill was an aristocratic patriot in the core of his being.
Less than a month after he became prime minister, Churchill energized Parliament:
“We shall defend our island…we shall fight on the beaches…on the landing grounds…in the fields…in the streets…in the hills…we shall never surrender.”
Darkest Hour is Churchill’s (Oldman’s) bright triumph.
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Movie 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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In high meadows: poems abide with 60 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 | Aug 29, 2026 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Joys of reading, Revolutionary War
a primary mover
Book review:
The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams
by Stacy Schiff (b1961)
New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2022
422 pages
If this is your first encounter with Stacy Schiff, you can guess it won’t be your last.
She writes powerful prose that makes you want to linger over the words, to learn more deeply, and to experience her transformation of history into something believable and real.
Samuel Adams was a primary mover of the American revolution.
The British loyalists on this side of the pond and the king and Parliament on the other side recognized his vital role in bringing the colonial Americans around to their ultimate decision to cut the ties that bound them to England and its king.
Samuel Adams tells a whole lot more about the story of the man than you learned before.
Take some time to read it.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2026 All rights reserved.
Book review: Waterloo
The slightly Hollywood bravery
of Richard Sharpe,
the butcher’s work done at the battle…
by Bernard Cornwell
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Empyrean: new poems with 57 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 | Aug 27, 2026 | American history, History, Human Nature, Politics, Power and inequality
Do a good thing today…
“…the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”
Rosa Louise McCauley Parks (1913-2005)
You remember…Rosa Parks wouldn’t give her seat
to a white man on the bus in Montgomery in 1955…
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Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2026 All rights reserved.
The Scarlet Letter, victim of Hollywood
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s version is best
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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 15, 2026 | Books, History, Reflections, World history
The faux convenience of historical eras…
It was the Renaissance, everybody knows that, right?
You know about the Middle Ages, right? Roughly a thousand years in European history, from the fall of Rome in 476 to the beginning of the Renaissance in the 14th century or so. The Renaissance itself lasted several hundred years, into the 17th century.
The thing is, the folks who lived through those extended dynamic eras didn’t know what they were doing. I mean, they didn’t know it was “the Middle Ages” or “the Renaissance.”
Those words weren’t used in the English language until the early 18th century.
During the Middle Ages, for example, medieval writers referred to historical events as “ancient” and described their own times as “modern.” Beauty is in the eye…
Pundits or philosophers of the future may call our current era the Age of Tomfoolery, or maybe something else…
We’ll never know.
Source:
Owen Barfield, History in English Words (Hudson, NY: The Lindisfarne Press, 1953), 167.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2026 All rights reserved.
“The beginning is always today.”
(quote, Mary Shelley)
so get started…
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My first name was rain: A dreamery of poems with 52 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 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 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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