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.
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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
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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 | 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.
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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
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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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by Richard Subber | Apr 22, 2022 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Human Nature
toil and trouble….and craziness
Book review:
The Witches: Salem, 1692
by Stacy Schiff (b1961)
Little, Brown and Company, New York, 2015
498 pages
It may be that Stacy Schiff has neglected to include some fact or sentiment about the Salem witch trials, but I can’t imagine what it might be. The Witches is an expansive compendium of the whos and whats and whys and wherefores of this compelling—yet essentially impenetrable—story about a community gone crazy.
Maybe you had to be there to understand it.
It’s too easy to suggest that the McCarthy Communism hunting in 1954 is a modern analogy, but it won’t work. The whole dreadful McCarthy thing was a political football, approaching a sideshow even though it attracted the nominal attention of the nation and destroyed many lives.
The Salem witch trials (and the witch hunting that went on in neighboring towns) consumed the waking hours of all the townsfolk, who were deeply convinced that witches exist and that they were in league with satanic forces.
For my taste, Schiff tells too much of the story. I would have been content with a less detailed account. There is repetition that is dispensable.
For my taste, she struck a good balance between telling the story as it happened, and inviting the reader to suspect that the teenage girls were fooling all along, and that too many accusers had a personal reason to “get” the accused, and that too many religious and civic leaders who struggled unsuccessfully with their religious faith and the opposing impulses of their arguably decent selves had quickly figured out that the witch craze was a very nasty game.
You don’t need to read the whole book to figure out that there was some very destructive bogus stuff going on in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1692.
You don’t need to read the whole book to be convinced that some folks aren’t continuously motivated by a decent streak of good will and a desire to support communal well-being.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2022 All rights reserved.
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My first name was rain: A dreamery of poems with 52 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 5, 2021 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Human Nature, Politics
…the Irish weren’t the only ones…
Book review:
How the Irish Became White
by Noel Ignatiev (1940-2019)
American author and historian
New York: Routledge, 1995
Ignatiev offers enough detail and context to satisfy historians of every stripe.
For the less ambitious reader, there may be a bit more than she cares to know in How the Irish Became White.
Of course, I certainly don’t presume to summarize the author’s careful exposition in 233 pages.
If you really want to know more about how non-black immigrants allowed and persuaded themselves to buy in to the systemic racism that flourished in America since the 17th century, dig in to How the Irish Became White.
One sure point is: don’t pick on the Irish exclusively. They certainly weren’t alone in their transgressions.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2021 All rights reserved.
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Above all: Poems of dawn and more with 74 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 | Dec 29, 2020 | Book reviews, Books, History, World history
the “milliohnim” and “the promised land”
Book review:
Thieves in the Night:
Chronicle of an Experiment
by Arthur Koestler (1905-1983)
The Macmillan Company, New York, 1946
357 pages
Koestler, a Hungarian-British writer and journalist, more famously wrote Darkness at Noon, a critique of Communism and totalitarianism.
Thieves in the Night, written later, is a gently powerful story. Koestler recounts the travails and limited joys of only a few of the “milliohnim” who sought a promised land. His characters are Jews, creating new settlements on purchased Arab land in the Holy Land, prior to World War II.
Men and women who create settlements live a tough life. A reader like me learns almost too much about the vagaries and drudgery of deliberately, fully conscious communal life on Ezra’s Tower, an isolated hilltop in Galilee. First, establish the security perimeter, then erect the watchtower, build the children’s dorm, construct the cowshed, set up the showers…in that order. The dining hall, the sleeping huts for the men and women, and the lavatories are to be built later.
The Mukhtar and his clan in the nearby Arab village do not welcome the Hebrew newcomers. Soon, the leader of the village delegation gives morbid advice to the settlers: “You young fools and children of death, you don’t know what may happen to you.” Bauman responds curtly: “We are prepared.” The Jewish settlement at Ezra’s Tower is not a resort.
The story of the settlers’ life at Ezra’s Tower is mostly drab. Koestler’s exploration of their mindset, their politics, their philosophy, and their religion all swirled together is stunning. Their aspirations and their misgivings, and their palpable legacy of homelessness and their transforming experiences, are irresistible.
Thieves in the Night is an adventure for the open and inquiring mind. Occasional sympathetic despair is a perfectly understandable reaction.
After you read this novel, look around you and ask yourself: do you see things a bit differently? Do you like your new conception of “a thief in the night.”
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2020 All rights reserved.
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Old Friends (book review)
Tracy Kidder tells so much truth about old age…
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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”
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by Richard Subber | Sep 13, 2020 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Revolutionary War
Book review:
An Empire on the Edge:
How Britain Came to Fight America
by Nick Bunker
Here’s the short version of Nick Bunker’s thesis:
King George and his government
let the North American colonies slip from their grasp.
A newcomer to the history of the American Revolution might think that this book is a cockeyed way to learn about the “shot heard ‘round the world” and the consequences of the shooting at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775.
An informed student of the Revolutionary War probably will find much new material in Bunker’s relentlessly detailed An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America.
On our side of the pond, we don’t have much opportunity to consider the war or the revolution from the British point of view.
Bunker offers devastating detail about the ill-informed, patronizing, self-serving, doctrinaire, and sometimes feckless actions of Lord North and the British government in the years that led to the sanguinary clash of British regulars and American farmers-militiamen on the road from Concord, through Lexington, to Boston on “that famous day and year.”
An Empire on the Edge offers extensive documentation confirming that the British leaders were largely ignorant of the scope and depth of colonial antipathy toward the various punitive measures that Britain sought to impose in North America, as early as 1765 (the Stamp Act) and continuing to the final, ill-fated steps to chastise the city of Boston after the notorious Tea Party in late 1773.
Bunker describes the half-cocked military moves by Lord North and his ministers in the years leading up to the disastrous outing to Lexington-Concord. The king and his government were not prepared to wage war successfully in North America, partly because they waited too long to believe that the colonists actually would fight, and partly because they disdained the colonials’ fighting capacity, and partly because they put higher priority on their Caribbean sugar colonies, and partly because they were pre-occupied with the military threat posed by France and various European intrigues.
Bunker doesn’t speculate on a question that occurs to me: after that first shot was fired at Lexington, did the British really commit themselves to winning the war?
The king and his government made the commitment to fight. They did not, however, at any time before or during the war, commit all the king’s horses and all the king’s men to the military campaign to regain dominion in North America. As the fighting began, a British victory was not immediately feasible. Perhaps it did not become feasible.
Bunker’s analysis of the planning and wrangling in Lord North’s war room suggests that the British wanted to win, but never pushed the right strategic buttons to bring victory within their grasp.
Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.
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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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My first name was rain: A dreamery of poems with 52 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”
