by Richard Subber | Nov 25, 2022 | American history, Book reviews, Books, Democracy, History, Politics, Power and inequality
the many meanings of “shareholder value”…
Book review:
The Man Who Broke Capitalism:
How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland
and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—
and How to Undo His Legacy
by David Gelles
New York: Simon & Schuster, 2022
264 pages
Gelles has written a dreadfully important expose of the evolution of the disastrous idolatry of “maximizing shareholder value” and funneling more and more of America’s corporate wealth to the relatively small cadre of executives and directors and financiers who took advantage of it to line their own pockets and deny economic success to just about everyone else.
Of course, Gelles doesn’t say that Jack Welch was the only one who did it. For my taste, the title of the book is a distraction from the truth: America’s financial elite have misappropriated the industrial wealth of the country.
The Man Who Broke Capitalism concludes with a broadly detailed array of governmental policies that would remediate the disaster that Jack Welch and the Chicago school of economists and so many others created to be a substitute for the notion that a corporation is a creature of our society, and is best understood as a conduit for creating goods, creating wealth, and widely distributing both.
* * * * * *
Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2022 All rights reserved.
Book review: Ethan Frome
it’s about not being satisfied with less…
by Edith Wharton
–
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”
* * * * * *
by Richard Subber | Nov 21, 2022 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Politics
Essential, readable, provocative…
Book review:
Major Problems in the Civil War and Reconstruction
1st and 2nd editions
Michael Perman, ed.
1st Edition: Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath and Company, 1991, 598 pp.
2nd Edition: Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998, 460 pp.
Major Problems in the Civil War and Reconstruction is a tantalizing collection of contemporary documents and complementary essays by modern writers.
Perman has assembled “essential, readable, and provocative” commentaries on the catastrophes of the Civil War and Reconstruction in the middle of the 19th century.
Maybe you know a lot about that time and those events. You’ll learn more from this commendably interesting and surprisingly insightful book.
Take the time to read both editions of Major Problems—both editions are equally valuable, with almost wholly different selections.
* * * * * *
Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2022 All rights reserved.
Book review: Shawshank Redemption
It’s a world I do not want to know…
by Stephen King
–
My first name was rain: A dreamery of poems with 53 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”
* * * * * *
by Richard Subber | Oct 31, 2022 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History
the navies were second priority…
Book review:
Under Two Flags:
The American Navy in the Civil War
by William M. Fowler Jr.
New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1990
352 pp.
I imagine most Civil War buffs will learn something by reading Under Two Flags.
Most standard histories don’t emphasize the naval elements of the Civil War fighting. Both Northern and Southern leaders thought the navies were important, and so they were.
Stephen Mallory, naval secretary of the Confederate States, had a job no one would have wanted in 1860. He came up short in most respects, because the Confederacy just couldn’t afford to build and maintain a potent navy.
Gideon Welles, his Northern counterpart, had only a somewhat easier job.
The naval commanders never managed to convince their respective commanders-in-chief that the navies were as vital as the armies in the Civil War conflict.
The sailors on both sides were brave men, but Fowler gives them second billing.
* * * * * *
Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2022 All rights reserved.
Common Sense by Thomas Paine (comments)
it wasn’t strictly business, but…
–
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”
* * * * * *
by Richard Subber | Oct 26, 2022 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Human Nature
he taught himself to read and write
Book review:
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass:
An American Slave
by Frederick Douglass
Benjamin Quarles, ed.
Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, written 1845, copyright 1960
163 pp.
Narrative is a devastatingly calm account of the life of Frederick Douglass as a slave and then a free man.
It’s very hard to read, let alone imagine the reality of the whippings that Douglass describes. It’s horrifying to recognize that some human beings brutalized other human beings with a whip.
Douglass taught himself to read and write.
He informs us about history that we don’t want to know, but must accept as true.
* * * * * *
Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2022 All rights reserved.
Poets talk about poetry
…a red hot bucket of love…
–
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”
* * * * * *
by Richard Subber | Oct 5, 2022 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Politics
a casual look at Civil War history
Book review:
A History of the People of the United States
During Lincoln’s Administration
by John Bach McMaster
New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1927
693 pp.
This is an intriguing historical excursion into American history from the vantage point of 1927.
McMaster’s style is notably less than academic—his very casual quotation style is a distraction.
Basically, he offers a sometimes superficial political perspective on the origins, conduct, and denouement of the American Civil War.
A well-informed reader can skim A History without undue loss.
* * * * * *
Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2022 All rights reserved.
Old Friends (book review)
Tracy Kidder tells truth about old age…
–
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”
* * * * * *
by Richard Subber | Sep 28, 2022 | American history, Book reviews, Books, Democracy, History
…they just walked away…
Book review:
Ends of War:
The Unfinished Fight of Lee’s Army
after Appomattox
by Caroline E. Janney
Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2021
331 pp.
I thought I know a lot about the American Civil War. Janney’s book, Ends of War, is a good reminder that there’s lots more to learn.
Lee surrendered his army to Grant on April 9, 1865. Of course it’s pretty well known that other Confederate Army units were still fighting for several months after that event.
Janney confirms this stark point: for tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers, the war didn’t end then. They just stopped actively fighting the Union forces.
Close to half of Lee’s men never actually surrendered at Appomattox, and this unappreciated reality was part of the foundation of the dangerous Southern mythology of the “Lost Cause.”
Lee had a bit less than 50,000 men under his command when he signed the surrender document in Wilmer McLean’s house. Less than 30,000 of Lee’s men were officially but very haphazardly “paroled” in the days following the surrender.
At least 20,000 men in dirty gray uniforms walked or rode away from Appomattox without officially surrendering, most of them hoping to head for home. Many of them remained devoted to “the cause.”
It seems that Grant and Lincoln and the Union forces desperately wanted to end the fighting, but there was no real Northern plan to deal with the peace that was the presumptive goal, and to end the Southern insurrection, and to realistically bring the people of the rebel states back into the Union.
For my taste, the book is too long. I’m sure Janney could have established her argument, made her case, and proved her point in fewer pages.
* * * * * *
Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2022 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Cradle Place
by Thomas Lux
just poems wrapped in a wet rag…
–
My first name was rain: A dreamery of poems with 53 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”
* * * * * *
