by Richard Subber | Jun 29, 2020 | American history, History, Tidbits
“The Six Grandfathers”
It’s generally believed that Mt. Rushmore was an unremarkable pile of rock before the famous sculptures of presidents were done.
Gutzon Borglum and his son, Lincoln Borglum, did the work starting in 1927, and it was completed in 1941. The Borglums and their crews blasted more than 400,000 tons of stone off the face of the mountain in the Black Hills in Keystone, SD.
Here’s the unfamiliar back story: It wasn’t always called Mt. Rushmore (The granite bluff was named after Charles Rushmore, a wealthy New York lawyer, in 1885).
The Lakota Sioux name for the mountain had been “The Six Grandfathers” (Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe).
It’s too bad the federal government didn’t authorize carving their likenesses into the face of the bluff.
N.B. The image is of Mt. Rushmore in 1905.
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Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2020 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Snow Goose
…sensual drama, it’s eminently poetic…
by Paul Gallico
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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 | Jan 10, 2020 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, World history
American leadership never was
what we thought it was…
Book review:
Fire in the Lake:
The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam
by Frances FitzGerald (b1940), a Pulitzer Prize winner
Boston: An Atlantic Monthly Press Book, Little Brown and Company, 1972
491 pages
I don’t know how much of an audience there was for Fire in the Lake in 1972. I feel confident in guessing there wasn’t enough.
The American war in Vietnam was far from over in 1972 when FitzGerald wrote this densely researched journalistic review of U. S. policies and actions and ignorance in Southeast Asia. She makes it easier to understand why the American war effort was doomed from its earliest phase.
You should read Fire in the Lake to get the whole story–that is, the whole story as it was knowable in 1972. Be prepared to acknowledge that much of what you previously believed—and thought you knew—was wrong.
The American commitment to “containing Communism” was prominent, and tragically uninformed.
South Vietnam was the wrong place to try to “contain Communism,” no matter what that might mean.
There are more than 58,000 names on the walls of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
Some of them are the names of my friends.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2020 All rights reserved.
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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 | Sep 4, 2019 | Book reviews, Books, History, World history
…the supermen were underground…
Book review:
Mila 18
by Leon Uris (1924-2003)
American writer, World War II veteran
Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1961
442 pages
Whatever you think you know about the Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1943, you’ll know more after you read Mila 18.
Leon Uris wrote a historically detailed work of realistic fiction that will fill you with gagging horror, and with endless respect for the brave Jewish fighters who kept the Nazi killing machine at bay for a month in 1943.
About 13,000 Jews died in the burning buildings, in the bunkers, and in the sewers inside the ghetto.
Their main resistance command post was in an underground bunker located at ulica Miła 18.
It’s an almost inconceivable irony that the Polish street address can be translated as “18 Pleasant Street.”
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2019 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Bartender’s Tale
Ivan Doig’s story, I mostly loved it…
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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 | Jul 1, 2019 | Book reviews, Books, Books Commentary, History, World history
much was not lost…
Book review:
The Map of Knowledge:
A Thousand-Year History
of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found
Violet Moller
New York: Doubleday, 2019
312 pages
It’s quite possible that Moller offers much more than you already know about Euclid’s The Elements (c300 BCE). and Ptolemy’s The Almagest, (c150 CE), and the many published works on anatomy and medicine by Galen (130-210 CE).
The Map of Knowledge is a scholarly account of the preservation of knowledge from ancient times to the present day. I bet you can guess that it’s not a beach book.
Moller forgot to mention that throughout the centuries, most human beings on the planet couldn’t read or write, and so it was the lucky, the gifted, and the self-selected few who preserved important knowledge for the benefit of succeeding generations. Think about a version of Fahrenheit 451, stretched over the centuries.
Go ahead, read Fahrenheit 451 again. Do it.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2019 All rights reserved.
Book review: Tales from Shakespeare
pretty good summaries by Charles and Mary Lamb…
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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 | Jan 28, 2019 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History
“…conquerors who saw themselves
more as guardians…”
Book review:
The Comanche Empire
by Pekka Hämäläinen
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.
This book will change your mind about how the West was won.
Hint: The Comanches got there first.
The Comanches arrived obscurely in the American Southwest in 1706. The Comanche Empire provocatively makes the case that the Comanches created an imposing Southwestern American empire that spanned 150 years. They blunted the 18th century colonial ambitions of the Spanish in Mexico and the French in Louisiana, and stalled the westward thrust of Americans and the U.S. government until the middle of the 19th century. A broad coalition of Comanche rancheria chiefs throughout the territory of Comancheria first dominated the Apaches, eventually turned against their Ute allies, and commercially or militarily subjugated numerous lesser tribes.
Comanches managed a succession of peace treaties and conflicts with the Spaniards and completely blocked their repeated efforts to extend colonial settlements northward from Mexico. The political, commercial and military supremacy of the Comanches was based principally on their success in adopting and adapting Spanish horses for efficient transportation, military power, and a thriving and lucrative trade in horses throughout the Southwest.
Hämäläinen‘s central argument invites—indeed it obviously provokes—a reasonable dispute about the credibility of his claim for a Comanche empire. Clearly, in classical political or geopolitical usage, the claim is untenable, at least in part; the Comanche empire had neither fixed borders, nor a single self-sustaining centralized supreme authority, nor a durable bureaucracy, nor a definitive political structure.
Nevertheless, the Comanches had a respected, recurring broadly representative council of chiefs that planned and organized extensive raids, trading and other commerce, and military operations. Their hunting, pasturing, and trading territories had indistinct geographic borders that were never surveyed or adjudicated; Comanches never sought to occupy and permanently control any specifically delineated territory. In The Comanche Empire, Hämäläinen says they were “conquerors who saw themselves more as guardians than governors of the land and its bounties.” Nonetheless, the geographical extent of the their domains was well known, respected and enforced by the Comanches.
Each Comanche rancheria had its own geographic territory, rigorous socio-military culture and hierarchical organization. The situational circumstances of Comanche military superiority, their control of trade and their ability through the decades to repeatedly impose and maintain obviously favorable terms in their treaty and trade agreements are undeniable evidence of the Comanches’ extended dominance of terrain, physical resources, culture and commerce, and, not least in importance, the Spanish and French colonial enterprises that sought to compete with them.
For decades the Comanches set the terms of their success; no competing power could defeat them, and no Indians or Europeans could evade the Comanches’ dominance in their domain.
It becomes obvious: the Comanches created a de facto empire.
Ultimately, they were marginalized by a combination of drought that constrained their bison hunting and weakened their pastoral horse culture, disruption of trade that limited their access to essential carbohydrate foodstuffs, epidemic disease that repeatedly thinned the Comanche populations, predatory bison hunting by the Americans in the early 1870s that wiped out the Indians’ essential food resource, and, finally, by the irresistible tide of U.S. government-sponsored westward migration that pushed American citizens into Comanche territory.
Too bad the Comanches left no accounts of their own. It would be fascinating to hear this story in their own words.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2019 All rights reserved.
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 | Nov 10, 2018 | Book reviews, Books, History, World history
A hero, not a saint
Book review:
Lafayette
by Harlow Giles Unger (b.1931)
Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2002
452 pages
I acknowledge the obvious: Unger fully entertains in recounting that Marie-Joseph-Paul-Yves-Roch-Gilbert du Motier de la Fayette was a national, military, political and, indeed, a paternal hero to millions in America and France during the American and (several) French revolutions.
There is no doubt that, despite the fact that he was one of the richest French nobles of his time, Lafayette was publicly and privately dedicated to republican government and a social/economic order that was far more egalitarian than the monarchical and aristocratic structures that prevailed.
Was he a great man? Unger, like many of his biographers, says yes. Lafayette was a courageous battlefield leader, he was an enlightened manorial lord who enhanced the lives of his peasants, and he was both outspoken and fearless, repeatedly, in literally dangerous political situations for a couple decades in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France. Unger amply—even poetically—demonstrates these lifelong characteristics of the man Americans called “our Marquis.”
I also feel obliged to call attention to some countervailing factors that Unger fully describes but does not adequately interpret.
Lafayette put his money where his mouth was. He repeatedly used his great personal wealth to pay and outfit the troops he commanded, when government funds and supplies ran low. I suggest a case could be made that the Marquis, uniquely among American commanders, paid for his military success in the Revolutionary War. Throughout the war, the options and operations of colonial commanders were significantly hindered by short funds and short supplies. If Lafayette had not been able to pay, feed, clothe, and arm his troops with his personal resources, could he have been as winning a general as he was? I suspect the answer is “No.”
Some biographers refer to Lafayette as the “victor” at Yorktown in 1781. Unger calls him a “hero” of Yorktown. Lafayette was not the only American general at Yorktown, and he wasn’t the only French general. Lafayette did use his small force to isolate Cornwallis in Yorktown, but he had to wait until Washington, Rochambeau and others arrived with sufficient forces before he participated in the final assaults.
In France he repeatedly declined to step up to the plate and take executive leadership, during the revolutionary and Napoleonic convulsions, when the French people and the contentious military/political factions would have handed the throne or the presidency of France to him on a velvet pillow. The Marquis repeatedly risked his life to defuse explosive situations by his personal, courageous intervention. However, Unger fastidiously details Lafayette’s repeated reluctance to take the final step and take control when, arguably, he could have stabilized dangerous situations, and forestalled or prevented catastrophic consequences. Lafayette wasn’t responsible for the violence, but, time after time, he left a void that unfortunately was filled by lesser men.
Was Lafayette a great man? Yes. A successful general? Yes. Was he a really lucky guy? Yes. Did he and his reputation benefit immensely from great wealth and fortuitous circumstances? Yes. Did he live up to his potential in serving France and the French nation? Maybe not.
There’s just one other thing: Unger profligately demonstrates that Lafayette and Washington had a deeply affectionate man-to-man—explicitly, like father and son—relationship, by using far too many excerpts from their numerous letters. It’s no biggie, but I had to stop reading them about halfway through the book…they bonded, I get it.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2018 All rights reserved.
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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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