by Richard Subber | Feb 15, 2025 | American history, Book reviews, Books, Democracy, History, Politics, Power and inequality
They didn’t have an easy life…
Book review:
The Pioneers:
The Heroic Story of the Settlers
Who Brought the American Ideal West
by David McCullough (1933-2022)
Pulitzer Prize winner
New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019
330 pages
This is bona fide David McCullough: endlessly researched, written in profoundly erudite prose, and honestly interesting to a wide range of readers.
The Pioneers tells you as much as (if not more than) you could ever care to know about the hardy folks who founded Marietta, Ohio, in the late 18th century, while George Washington was figuring out how to be our first president.
They didn’t have an easy life. They worked hard to keep slavery out of the Northwest Territory. They weren’t worried much about displacing the Native Americans who had lived in that region for thousands of years. They believed that they were brave and dedicated to making a good life, for themselves and their children.
They did a decent job, really. Read all about it, or read as much of it as you care to.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Bartender’s Tale
Ivan Doig’s story, I mostly loved it…
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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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by Richard Subber | Jan 18, 2025 | American history, Book reviews, Books, Democracy, History, Human Nature, Politics, Power and inequality
what’s right is right…
Book review:
No Constitutional Right to be Ladies:
Women and the Obligations of Citizenship
by Linda K. Kerber (b1940)
New York: Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1998
405 pages
Kerber, a well-respected historian, makes what should be an obvious point: women are citizens, just like men, and they should share all the rights and obligations of citizenship.
She disputes, in compelling detail, that women have a constitutional right “to be ladies” when that is conceived as separating them from a complete status as functioning citizens who are the constitutional equals of men (even the ones they’ve married!).
In my mind, it’s not a “feminist” thing or a “suffrage” thing. It’s a matter-of-fact thing—nothing about it doesn’t make sense.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Oops, Columbus didn’t “discover” America
…but he got close…
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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 7, 2025 | American history, Book reviews, Books, Democracy, History, Politics, Revolutionary War
…John Adams,
in the thick of it…
Book review:
John Adams
by David McCullough (1933-2022)
Simon & Schuster, New York, 2001
751 pages
Maybe you’re like me. Maybe you don’t think biography is the best way to do history. David McCullough’s Pulitzer Prize-winner is a reason to change your mind a bit.
John Adams, simply, is a really good book. McCullough helps you to warm up to this American icon and to his personal experience in leading the American Revolution and the first formative years of the American republic.
Adams, our first vice president and second president, was among the few who were in the thick of it from the beginning, and he never shrank from doing what he expansively viewed as his duty to his new country.
McCullough’s prose is a delightful experience for the serious historian and for the armchair dabbler who likes a good read. From cover to cover, John Adams is a lush, genuine presentation of a man, his loved ones, his career, his commitment to do good works and his never-flagging appreciation that the object of government should be to do the people’s business and make possible
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi”
“…two foolish children…”
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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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by Richard Subber | Dec 31, 2024 | American history, History, Human Nature, Theater and play reviews
to be or not to be…
Movie review:
Old Henry
The tension builds slowly in Old Henry (2021, not rated, 99 minutes) and you may be tempted to stop waiting to find out what it’s all about.
Truth is, it’s easy to stay with it.
There are no “stars” in Old Henry, and no Hollywood gush.
It’s a 1906 Oklahoma western that doesn’t need a soundtrack.
There is father-son conflict and bonding galore.
There is persistent necessity to consider the yin and yang of what’s right and what’s wrong and a lot of the in-betweens.
You’ll learn a few things you don’t already know about the real-life Henry McCarty who called himself William Bonney and is known to history as Billy the Kid.
You can take some time to think about this: are we who we were, or are we who we are, or can we be who we want to be, or should we be who our loved ones think we are…
Old Henry received the “Best Feature” award at the 2021 Almeria Western Film Festival.
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Movie review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
“The beginning is always today.”
(quote, Mary Shelley)
so get started…
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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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by Richard Subber | Oct 26, 2024 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Power and inequality
…they readily went to war…
Book review:
Mayflower:
A Story of Courage, Community, and War
by Nathaniel Philbrick (b1956)
New York: Viking, The Penguin Group, 2006
461 pages
Philbrick offers his usual compelling narrative in Mayflower.
It becomes clear rather quickly that he’s not telling the elementary school version of the Pilgrims and Plymouth Rock and the “first Thanksgiving” that you may remember from your childhood.
The Pilgrims—the Separatists, as they named themselves—didn’t come to North America to establish religious freedom. They were escaping from limitations on their religious freedom that they had endured in England, and later, to some extent, in Holland. As the years went by in Plymouth and the Massachusetts Bay colony, they certainly did not extend any tolerance of religious freedom to those Europeans and Native Americans who held different religious beliefs.
The Pilgrims were not simply a happy, peaceful people. They readily went to war with the Indians, in both defensive and offensive campaigns.
Many of the Pilgrims suffered gruesome physical privations and many of them died soon after arriving in what greedy European promoters liked to call The New World.
If you’re thinking how wonderful it would have been to be a Pilgrim in Plymouth in 1620, think again.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
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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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by Richard Subber | Sep 28, 2024 | American history, Books, History, Power and inequality
not what you learned in school…
Book review:
Facing East from Indian Country:
A Native History of Early America
Daniel K. Richter (b1954)
American historian, a Pulitzer Prize finalist
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001
You can count on Richter to provide a full course meal of insights and commentaries and knowledge about the original peoples of North America.
Dig in to Facing East from Indian Country to learn about how the Indians felt and what they understood about the Europeans who invaded their lands.
Nearly all of what we know about the Indians in pre-colonial and colonial times was written down by Europeans, but Richter is dedicated to discerning the Indians’ meaning, intent and recognition from the contexts and styles of those accounts.
This is not the American history you learned in school.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 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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