by Richard Subber | Aug 24, 2023 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Human Nature
you can’t change your socks…
Book review:
With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa
by Eugene B. Sledge (1923-2001)
New York: Oxford University Press, 1981
326 pages
Marine Cpl. Eugene B. Sledge (his Marine buddies called him “Sledgehammer”) knew there is no glory in combat. There is fear, comradeship, pain, duty, hunger, honesty, sadness, loyalty, and death.
With the Old Breed is a shockingly restrained and horribly candid account of Sledge’s experiences in the attacks on Peleliu and Okinawa by the 3rd Battalion, 5th Regiment, of the 1st Marine Division in the last year of World War II.
Read it, and you can mumble their prayers as you share the troubled joy of combat soldiers who survive the fighting in which their friends die.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
“Inner child”…a haiku poem
Remember how the merry-go-round
was a real challenge, the first time?
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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 | Aug 20, 2023 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Politics, Power and inequality
before there were “managers”…
Book review:
The Visible Hand:
The Managerial Revolution in American Business
by Alfred D. Chandler Jr. (1918-2007)
Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977
608 pages
A densely researched and densely written history of the evolving American environment for various forms of capitalism and the appearance in the middle of the 19th century of “managers” who didn’t own the business or do the work.
You’ll learn some stuff about commercial, entrepreneurial, financial, and managerial capitalism.
This is an academic treatment of the good, the bad, and the ugly in the history of American corporate structure and performance. Chandler rarely refers to the political and moral aspects of the good works, the charlatanry, and the grossly criminal actions of the movers and shakers in the 19th century and early 20th century business world.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
Book review: Saint Joan
by George Bernard Shaw
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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 | Aug 8, 2023 | American history, Book reviews, Books, Democracy, History, Politics, Power and inequality
we need love, and we need trust…
Book review:
The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism
by Martin Wolf
New York: Penguin, 2023
474 pages
Wolf examines the problem in plain language: the imperatives and the expectations of democratic government both complement and conflict with the pursuit of personal and corporate success in a capitalist world.
His arguments and considerations are a lot more nuanced than that. You can learn to think in new ways about the despairing failures that put our society at risk.
The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism emphasizes one key point: in both the democratic and capitalist frames of reference, we need to be able to trust our leaders and the folks whose personal interests are at variance with those of the rest of the members of our society.
Aye, there’s the rub.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
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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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 27, 2023 | Book reviews, Books, History
swords, and dragons, and boasting…
Book review:
Beowulf
Seamus Heaney, trans.
New York, W. W. Norton and Company, 2000
213 pages
A long time ago, a thousand years, give or take, an anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet writing in the Old English language completed a 3,182-line poem we call “Beowulf.”
Just about everyone thinks it’s a classic.
It hasn’t been adapted for TV yet, and there are a number of reasons for that. It’s heroic, but the modern English translation is dramatically flat.
It’s about tough guys with swords, and dragons, and mead halls, and manly boasting, and such.
Beowulf is everything it’s made out to be, and not much more.
I’m happy to assume that it was a more thrilling read and a more entrancing tale in the 9th or 10th century, or whenever it was first written and taken on the road by the storytellers.
Beowulf is a whole lot better than TV.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
Book review:
The American Revolution: A History
The “Founders” were afraid
of “democracy”…
by Gordon S. Wood
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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 | Jun 17, 2023 | History, Human Nature, Reflections, Theater and play reviews
…a perfection of evil…
Movie review:
Conspiracy
The Wannsee Conference in Hitler’s Germany, January 1942
Starring Kenneth Branagh, Stanley Tucci, Colin Firth (2001)
Here’s the short version: watching Conspiracy is like drinking molten lead.
Conspiracy is an almost flawless portrayal of naked evil being done by powerful men, each of whom has lost or abandoned his moral compass.
It is dry, withering, completely transparent, all too believable—not merely because we know it’s all true. We know that there are powerful men and women alive today who are willing to do blasphemously wrong things like killing 6 million Jews.
Conspiracy dramatizes the Wannsee Conference that first officially articulated the Final Solution for the Jews of Europe: the Holocaust.
Stanley Tucci as SS Major Adolph Eichmann, Kenneth Branagh as Hitler’s Chief of Security Reinhard Heydrich, Colin Firth as Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart (a lawyer who wrote the racist Nuremberg Laws), and 12 others show how it was probably done—almost without passion—around a long conference table in a manor house outside Berlin. One of the participants failed to destroy his copy of the minutes. This surviving document was used in the post-WWII Nuremberg Trials.
Conspiracy is frightening, horrifying, and disgusting. It is a perfection of the evil that men can do.
The antidote for watching it is simple: do a good thing every day.
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Movie review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Comanche Empire
the other story of the American West…
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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 | Jun 13, 2023 | American history, Books, History, Politics, Power and inequality
the men in gray went AWOL
Book review:
Bitterly Divided: The South’s Inner Civil War
by David Williams
New York: The New Press, 2008
310 pages
Wow! Bitterly Divided is a game-changing perspective on the causes and conduct of the American Civil War.
Read this compellingly researched book by David Williams to get the details.
Some highlights:
About a half million black and white Southerners served in the Union army, about 25% of the total number of men in arms wearing blue uniforms.
There was substantial opposition to secession in every state that seceded. Politicians and rich slaveholders literally corrupted the elections to make secession happen.
In the latter years of the war, at any given time as many as two-thirds of the common soldiers in the Confederate army were absent with or without leave. General Lee worried persistently about deserters.
The Confederate armed forces always had enough ammunition, but the soldiers and their wives and families at home never had enough food—because rich plantation owners insisted on planting the more profitable tobacco and cotton crops.
The Civil War was fought about slavery—because the big slaveholders refused to give up their source of free labor.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
Book review: “Bartleby, the Scrivener”
Here is loneliness beyond understanding…
by Herman Melville
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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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