by Richard Subber | Oct 29, 2026 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Human Nature, Revolutionary War
The British stopped fighting…
Book review:
The Men Who Lost America:
British Leadership,
the American Revolution,
and the Fate of the Empire
by Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy (b1959)
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013
466 pages
O’Shaughnessy takes the unusual approach of writing nine detailed biographies of the men in the British government whose collective decisions and actions culminated in the loss of the North American colonies during the Revolutionary War.
The Men Who Lost America is a dispassionate debunking of the schoolboy history myth that Washington and his brave Continental Army troops survived the Valley Forge winter to beat the British at Yorktown in 1781, and win the war. Huzzah!
Of course the British—from King George III to his key ministers to the generals and admirals who tried to follow their orders—wanted to win the war. Of course they did.
Nevertheless, The Men Who Lost America lays out the numerous ways that these men never got around to sending enough troops and ships to subdue the American rebels. They never had a war-winning reserve of troops and ships to send, because they were too busy trying to secure their Caribbean sugar island colonies against French and Spanish attacks, and too busy fighting imperial military actions in Canada, Gibraltar, and India.
In fact, O’Shaughnessy demonstrates that the British were not totally defeated in North America. In simple terms, the men who “lost America” finally stopped fighting a war they finally realized they could not win.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2026 All rights reserved.
Book review: An Empire Divided
King George and his ministers
wanted the Caribbean sugar islands
more than they wanted the 13 colonies…
by Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy
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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 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
–
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 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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by Richard Subber | Jun 23, 2026 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History
upright folks made the start
Book review:
One Small Candle
by Thomas J. Fleming (1927-2017)
New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1964
222 pages
Wow! One Small Candle is a satisfyingly readable, confidently written, fully researched book about the terrifyingly precarious lives of the Mayflower crew and passengers in 1620. You didn’t want to be there. So many of them died at sea or too soon after they landed at Plymouth Bay.
Fleming just tells it like it was. For long times, they had too little food and drink, couldn’t wash, couldn’t change their clothes , and watched their sick family members and friends die because nothing could be done to help them.
Think about living for weeks in a small house with unthinkably low ceilings and no bathrooms and 100 other people. Even if you like the other people, that ain’t fun.
I don’t want to gloss over this part: Fleming makes the common mistake of calling the native inhabitants “savages.” They weren’t “savages.” They weren’t Europeans, of course. They were among millions who lived in and civilized North America for thousands of years before the Europeans “discovered” it.
They Mayflower passengers were an upright mix of dedicated religious folk and mostly hearty adventurers. Many of them gave their lives in their quest to build new lives at Plymouth. They struggled mightily to light one small candle, and sometimes they happily sang around the candle. Their candle burns still, and we have to be careful that we don’t snuff it out.
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Book 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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many waters: more poems with 53 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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