by Richard Subber | Jun 8, 2023 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History
“Last call! Stage leaves in 10 minutes!”
Book review:
Stage Coach and Tavern Days
by Alice Morse Earle
New York: The Macmillan Company, 1900
Reissued by Singing Tree Press, Detroit, MI
449 pages
Old-fashioned, folksy prose. Stage Coach and Tavern Days is just dripping with details for the sincere history buff or historian.
Just in case you forgot, taking a ride in a stagecoach was a noisy, dusty, bone-thumping experience…and there was no onboard bathroom.
If you have a secret love affair with stage coaches, and taverns, and spirituous beverages in the 18th century, dive in.
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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
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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 | May 28, 2023 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Human Nature
self-serving lies, and dreams…
Book review:
The Self-Made Man in America:
The Myth of Rags to Riches
by Irvin G. Wyllie (1920-1974)
New York, The Free Press, 1954
210 pages
The Self-Made Man in America is a historian’s delight.
Wyllie offers the multiple meanings of “the self-made man” throughout American history, connecting historical elements of the American dream and the self-serving promotion of the concept by titans of industry and their bankers.
There is a panoply of quotations from key decision-makers throughout the decades that aid the reader in understanding how Americans at all ranks in the socioeconomic spectrum advocated, criticized, and embodied the siren song of “the self-made man.”
To be sure, Wyllie plainly states his verdict: “Throughout all our history the self-made man was the exception not the rule…success has been for the few, not the many….Men who occupy the lowest places in our society have known the facts for a long time…but…men on the bottom need dreams.” (p. 174)
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
Book review:
Moral Tribes by Joshua Greene
he’s sincere, but off the mark…
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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 | May 14, 2023 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Joys of reading, 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 a decent life for all.
Adams, of course, couldn’t stop himself from being a politician, and he wasn’t the nicest kind.
The Alien and Sedition Acts were among the lowest points of American politics.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
Book review: Who Built America?
…including people
who got their hands dirty
by Christopher Clark and Nancy Hewitt
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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 | May 9, 2023 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Human Nature, Politics
we ask too much…
Book review:
What It Is Like to Go to War
by Karl Marlantes
New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2011
256 pages
There are two kinds of readers who can presume to learn something from Marlantes’ second book, What It Is Like to Go to War: those who have combat experience, and those who don’t.
I guess you will feel just about every emotion while you’re reading it.
Of course we ask too much of our men and women who go to war.
Of course, sadly, we don’t know how to say “thank you” and we find it hard to figure out how to say “you don’t have to tell us everything you did, unless you want to.”
Of course we don’t say often enough “you’re still a good person.”
Marlantes’ first book was Matterhorn, a robustly intuitive assessment of the mind and experience of a warfighter.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
A poet is a “maker”
…and it doesn’t have to rhyme…
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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 | Mar 30, 2023 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Politics, Power and inequality
Tell yourself the truth…
Book review:
Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis
by Jared Diamond (b1937)
New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2019
Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel won a Pulitzer Prize in 1998.
502 pages.
Diamond delivers a knock-out with every one of his books. Upheaval is no exception.
Diamond fully backs up his frank and frightening assessment of the United States in its current crises.
America and Americans have many strengths, including our geographic stronghold and our democratic traditions. We’re facing many fault lines, not least of which is our increasingly paralyzing political polarization and refusal to embrace sensible compromise to get good things done for all Americans. Repeat for effect.
Upheaval is not a feel-good book. It is a call to action, with a credible road map and many reasons to fear our failure to face up to our crises.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
Book review: Shakespeare’s Wife
Germaine Greer went overboard a bit…
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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 | Mar 15, 2023 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Power and inequality
guns and germs…
Book review:
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
by Charles Mann
New York: Vintage Books, 2011
1491 offers everything you never knew about civilized people in the Americas before the Europeans arrived and killed most of them (OK, many died in battle, but it was European diseases, mostly). Maybe close to 100 million “native” people died within 100 years or so of the “discovery” by Columbus…but hold on, this book is not about Wounded Knee-type criticism or ex post facto self-flagellation.
In 1491, Mann beautifully describes the marvelous sophistication of cultures, cities, agriculture, arts, and science that blossomed in North America, Central America, and South America thousands of years ago, in many cases predating achievements and growth and civilization in Europe.
Yes, the Incas never used the wheel except for children’s toys.
Yes, the Mississippian city of Cahokia was a bustling port and a trading center with population equal to Paris in France—and that was 500 years before Columbus sailed.
Yes, the Olmec culture in what is now Mexico invented the zero whole centuries before mathematicians in India did the same.
My recollection of schoolboy learning about the history of the Americas is that the dates and events were tied to discovery and conquest and colonization by Europeans. The implication was that, before the white men with guns, germs and steel arrived, nothing much was going on in whole continents characterized more by “virgin land” and “endless wilderness” than by people who had agriculture, city life, art, trade, commerce, religion, science, kings, and philosophers.
Mann offers 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. For me, the joy of reading this book is learning about the multiplicity of cultures that flourished in the Americas, and learning how they tamed and managed and very greenly conserved their environment…and for me, the sad revelation of this book is understanding that the peoples of the Americas were human beings whose achievements were noble and notable, and yet, lamentably, their cultural legacies are largely lost and the losses are barely mourned.
In 1533 Pizarro and his conquistadors at Cuzco precipitated the decline of the 300-year-old Inca empire in Peru. Fifty years later, the Spanish colonial administrators in Peru ordered the burning of all the Incan “khipu” knotted string records because they were “idolatrous objects.” Khipu were the Incas’ only form of writing. The smoke from the burning of their books gets in your eyes, forever and ever.
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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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