by Richard Subber | May 29, 2025 | American history, Politics, Power and inequality, Theater and play reviews
the spadework for the 13th Amendment…
Movie review:
Lincoln
2012, PG-13, 150 minutes
The movie Lincoln is about Lincoln, and we don’t need to spell out his name. Daniel Day-Lewis gives a performance as the Great Emancipator that rings true on both the good side and the not so good side. Sally Field rather woodenly plays the role of Mrs. Lincoln, or, as she preferred, “Mrs. President.”
Lincoln was a politician—we tend to forget that. The subplot of the movie is the horse trading and the not-so-savory vote buying that went on in the runup to the successful vote on the 13th Amendment to abolish slavery. Lincoln’s right-hand men did what he asked them to do and what they knew he wanted them to do—and Lincoln finally did a bit of the spadework himself.
Lincoln is not a spectacular movie. It’s dark in many ways. It is profoundly historical, and the drama keeps peeking through the windows.
One bag of potato chips is enough.
By the way, Lincoln was born in 1809, when it wasn’t widely popular to give babies a middle name.
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Movie review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Book review:
John Eliot: “Apostle to the Indians”
…a righteous man of his times
by Ola Elizabeth Winslow
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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 | May 15, 2025 | American history, Books, History
The “pack horse librarians” of Kentucky in 1935
Another daunting truth about the Great Depression in America (1929-1939):
Almost two-thirds of the beleaguered folks in eastern Kentucky
had no access to public libraries,
and about 30% of rural Kentuckians were illiterate (!).
Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration to the rescue! In 1935 the WPA organized a system of rural book deliveries by women on horseback—the “pack horse librarians.” (A “pack horse” was one carrying a load of any kind, and the “book ladies” piled on the books for their treks among the rural folk). As their delivery service flourished, they delivered about 3,000 books each month to kids and adults on their routes.
The pack horse librarians earned about $28 a month (roughly $500 in current dollars). Their book inventory was limited: the riders themselves created recipe books and scrapbooks of current events, and more or less every PTA member in Kentucky donated books for their patrons.
The most popular books? It was a regular rundown of favorites: travel, adventure, religion, kids’ picture books, and detective and romance magazines.
Eleanor Roosevelt, a champion of this equine service, visited one of the offices in West Liberty, Kentucky. The pack horse librarians kept up their work until 1943, when paying for World War II took priority.
The book lovers in rural Kentucky had to wait about 15 years to regain regular access to books, which was re-established when some of the early bookmobiles were put into service.
See more details at this Open Culture website
Here’s a topical 2019 novel about one of the pack horse librarians:
The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek
by Kim Michele Richardson
click here
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Blithedale Romance
by Nathaniel Hawthorne, not his best…
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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 10, 2025 | American history, Book reviews, Books, Democracy, History, Joys of reading, Politics, Power and inequality
seemingly unavoidable…
Book review:
The Demon of Unrest
by Erik Larson (b1954)
New York: Crown Publishing Group, div. of Penguin Random House, 2024
565 pages
You’ll recognize the casually engaging prose and the dedicated storytelling style of Erik Larson. It’s a pleasure to read everything he writes.
Larson digs deep to explore the nature of the “demon of unrest” that made trouble for decades and wouldn’t stop provoking the evil sentiments and the violent politics that preceded the historic outbreak of the American Civil War in the Charleston harbor in April 1861.
The Demon of Unrest names and spotlights all the characters who played mostly behind-the-scenes roles as Lincoln and Davis and Beauregard and Scott and Seward and Ruffin and their well-known colleagues blustered and schemed and waited and welcomed and feared the seemingly unavoidable war to end slavery.
No matter how much you know, you’ll learn something more about the assault on Ft. Sumter by reading this book.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 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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by Richard Subber | Apr 20, 2025 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Revolutionary War
King George wanted to win the war…
the other guys, not so much…
Book review:
Iron Tears:
America’s Battle for Freedom,
Britain’s Quagmire: 1775:1783
Stanley Weintraub (1929-2019)
New York: Free Press, 2005
375 pages
For some time I have indulged my suspicion that the British never really tried very hard to win the Revolutionary War.
Stanley Weintraub’s Iron Tears isn’t the first book that has reinforced my understanding of this most iconic event in American history. If you’re interested, try Nick Bunker’s An Empire on the Edge or Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy’s An Empire Divided.
Weintraub offers a solidly researched and richly anecdotal account of the military details and the political wrangling that prolonged the war for several years until the British ministers and politicians finally admitted to themselves that they couldn’t win the war.
King George III was fatuously optimistic and persistently unrealistic—to the bitter end—about the prospects for winning a war that he desperately identified with his own persona and his royal stature.
Weintraub makes it irrefutably clear that at no time during the Revolutionary War did the British send enough men and ships to win in North America, that is, to put down the rebellion and re-establish full constitutional Parliamentary control of the 13 colonies. Hint: the British “sugar island” colonies in the Caribbean were more important, and the British never stopped looking over their shoulders at prospective and real war with France, Spain, and other countries.
On October 18, 1781, General Washington accepted the capitulation of the army of General Cornwallis at Yorktown. On November 25, an official dispatch with the bad news finally reached Lord North, the British prime minister, at Downing Street. It is reported that he exclaimed “Oh God! It is all over!”
Quite possibly he was overcome with grief and relief.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Book review: A Cold Welcome
The culprit was global cooling,
500 years ago…
by Sam White
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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 | Feb 15, 2025 | American history, Book reviews, Books, Democracy, History, Politics, Power and inequality
They didn’t have an easy life…
Book review:
The Pioneers:
The Heroic Story of the Settlers
Who Brought the American Ideal West
by David McCullough (1933-2022)
Pulitzer Prize winner
New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019
330 pages
This is bona fide David McCullough: endlessly researched, written in profoundly erudite prose, and honestly interesting to a wide range of readers.
The Pioneers tells you as much as (if not more than) you could ever care to know about the hardy folks who founded Marietta, Ohio, in the late 18th century, while George Washington was figuring out how to be our first president.
They didn’t have an easy life. They worked hard to keep slavery out of the Northwest Territory. They weren’t worried much about displacing the Native Americans who had lived in that region for thousands of years. They believed that they were brave and dedicated to making a good life, for themselves and their children.
They did a decent job, really. Read all about it, or read as much of it as you care to.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Bartender’s Tale
Ivan Doig’s story, I mostly loved it…
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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 | Jan 18, 2025 | American history, Book reviews, Books, Democracy, History, Human Nature, Politics, Power and inequality
what’s right is right…
Book review:
No Constitutional Right to be Ladies:
Women and the Obligations of Citizenship
by Linda K. Kerber (b1940)
New York: Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1998
405 pages
Kerber, a well-respected historian, makes what should be an obvious point: women are citizens, just like men, and they should share all the rights and obligations of citizenship.
She disputes, in compelling detail, that women have a constitutional right “to be ladies” when that is conceived as separating them from a complete status as functioning citizens who are the constitutional equals of men (even the ones they’ve married!).
It’s not a “feminist” thing or a “suffrage” thing. It’s a matter-of-fact thing—nothing about it doesn’t make sense.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Oops, Columbus didn’t “discover” America
…but he did get close…
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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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