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 | 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 12, 2023 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History
…where the buffalo stopped roaming…
Book review:
Crazy Horse
by Larry McMurtry (1936-2021)
Bibliophile, novelist, Pulitzer Prize winner
New York: Penguin Group, 1999 (Penguin Lives series)
148 pages
Apparently it is Larry McMurtry’s goal in life to avoid writing everything I don’t like.
Crazy Horse is a gem: crisp, appealing, well-informed, in McMurtry’s signature style—crafted words, no nonsense, literate. This is a candid assessment of the life and times of Ta-Shunka-Witco (“His horse is crazy”) (c1840-1877).
If there had been no relentless assault against the American Indians by white America and its government, Crazy Horse might have been an anonymous, eccentric figure among the Oglala Sioux. His compatriots probably understood him about as well as we do—that is, not much.
From several points of view, in the middle of the 19th century and now, Crazy Horse was a loner and a lone eagle. McMurtry does a commendable job of trying to see the world as Crazy Horse saw it. The world as Crazy Horse wanted it to be was shriveling around him during his entire life.
It’s too bad that Crazy Horse wasn’t born in an earlier, less contentious, more agreeable time. It’s too bad that he couldn’t simply have made his home where the buffalo roamed.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Lost History of Stars
Dave Boling’s delicate story
about a brutal war
–
Writing Rainbows: Poems for Grown-Ups with 59 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 19, 2023 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History
the first Army nurses…
Book review:
The Nurses: Episodes 1-16
by Janet M. Kovarik, 2017
The Nurses tells some of the other stories about the American Civil War. You probably know about Dorothea Dix, the courageous activist who became Superintendent of Army Nurses during the war.
The Nurses invites you to understand the lives and the spirit of the women who rushed to serve under her leadership. Emmelda Poole and Livinia Atwater are two marvelous women created in Kovarik’s imagination, but they are real enough.
The author writes pleasing stories about believable women who helped their fellow man in ways only women could have done in the middle of the 19th century. Women like Emmelda and Livinia offered to suffering soldiers the kind of loving care that the doctors and the surgeons couldn’t or wouldn’t provide.
If you’re a Civil War fan, dig in to The Nurses.
If you just like good storytelling and remarkably credible dialogue, dig in to The Nurses.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
Book review: Address Unknown
A friendship corrupted by Nazi hatred in WWII
by Kathrine Kressmann Taylor
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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 15, 2023 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Politics, Power and inequality
the birth of “big business”
Book review:
The Essential Alfred Chandler:
Essays Toward a Historical Theory of Big Business
by Alfred D. Chandler Jr. (1918-2007)
Boston: The Harvard Business School Press, 1988
538 pages
Chandler offers a deep and dispassionate inquiry into the genesis of “big business” and the “big multinational corporation” in the latter part of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century.
There’s much of interest here, even for the casual student of history and the “non-business” types.
Much of the motivation and much of the opportunity for the development of what Chandler chooses to call the “modern business enterprise” was circumstantial and related to geography and the exigencies of human and animal labor.
The author chooses to avoid the legal/illegal, moral, and philosophical aspects of the rise of big business, and the vastly maldistributed benefits of the same.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
iambic pentameter, y’know?
da DUH, da DUH, and stuff…
“In search of”…my poem
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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 3, 2023 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, World history
a nightmare in slow motion
Book review:
Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War
by William Manchester (1922-2004)
Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1980
401 pages
Manchester’s quietly passionate memories of being a young Marine fighting in the Pacific theater in World War II are terrible to behold.
He tells all of his story, the good, the bad, and the really hard to read parts.
Reading Goodbye, Darkness means watching another man’s nightmare in slow motion.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
Book review: An Empire on the Edge
by Nick Bunker
The British wanted to win
the Revolutionary War,
but they had good reasons
for not trying too hard…
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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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