by Richard Subber | Apr 6, 2024 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Politics, Revolutionary War
the Adams-Jefferson “friendship”
Book review:
Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson
by Gordon S. Wood (b. 1933)
New York: Penguin Press, 2017
502 pages, extensive index and notes
Gordon Wood is a rightly acclaimed historian and author. Friends Divided is not his best work.
Wood has enviably thorough knowledge of the history of the American revolution, and his oeuvre is fascinating and compelling.
It seems to me that Wood has invested too much of idealized historical circumstances into the thinking of Adams and Jefferson, and the torrent of writing that they produced.
They were influential human beings and leaders in their society. I don’t buy the so-called “great man” concept of historiography. I don’t think Wood endorses it, but it seems that he has pasted the towering personalities of Adams and Jefferson into and onto his remarkably comprehensive understanding of the Enlightenment, American revolutionary politics, and the social/commercial evolution of America before and after the divorce from Britain.
Adams and Jefferson had a celebrated (then and now) on-and-off friendship during most of their adult lives.
Friends Divided is not what the American Revolution is all about, despite Gordon Wood’s rapturous concatenation of the “friends” and the world they lived in.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
“…an era of corruption in High Places…”
Old Abe got it right….
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 | Aug 31, 2023 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Revolutionary War
a primary mover
Book review:
The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams
by Stacy Schiff (b1961)
New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2022
422 pages
If this is your first encounter with Stacy Schiff, you can guess it won’t be your last.
She writes powerful prose that makes you want to linger over the words, to learn more deeply, and to experience her transformation of history into something believable and real.
Samuel Adams was a primary mover of the American revolution.
The British loyalists on this side of the pond and the king and Parliament on the other side recognized his vital role in bringing the colonial Americans around to their ultimate decision to cut the ties that bound them to England and its king.
Samuel Adams tells a whole lot more about the story of the man than you learned before.
Take some time to read it.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
Book review: Hag-Seed
by Margaret Atwood…it ain’t Shakespeare
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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 | May 14, 2023 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Joys of reading, Revolutionary War
…John Adams,
in the thick of it…
Book review:
John Adams
by David McCullough (1933-2022)
Simon & Schuster, New York, 2001
751 pages
Maybe you’re like me. Maybe you don’t think biography is the best way to do history. David McCullough’s Pulitzer Prize-winner is a reason to change your mind a bit.
John Adams, simply, is a really good book. McCullough helps you to warm up to this American icon and to his personal experience in leading the American Revolution and the first formative years of the American republic.
Adams, our first vice president and second president, was among the few who were in the thick of it from the beginning, and he never shrank from doing what he expansively viewed as his duty to his new country.
McCullough’s prose is a delightful experience for the serious historian and for the armchair dabbler who likes a good read. From cover to cover, John Adams is a lush, genuine presentation of a man, his loved ones, his career, his commitment to do good works and his never-flagging appreciation that the object of government should be to do the people’s business and make possible a decent life for all.
Adams, of course, couldn’t stop himself from being a politician, and he wasn’t the nicest kind.
The Alien and Sedition Acts were among the lowest points of American politics.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
Book review: Who Built America?
…including people
who got their hands dirty
by Christopher Clark and Nancy Hewitt
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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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by Richard Subber | Sep 5, 2022 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Human Nature, Politics, Power and inequality, Revolutionary War
umm, they forgot about “patriotism”…
Book review:
The Political Depravity of the Founding Fathers:
Studies in the History of The United States
by John Bach McMaster
New York: Noonday Press, division of Farrar, Straus & Company, 1964
Originally published as With The Fathers in 1896
McMaster writes with the perspective of 125 years ago, and it’s all too obvious. However, this is not a fatal problem.
The Political Depravity of the Founding Fathers is a largely chronological elaboration of the many political and self-interested motivations that were the controlling factors in the creation of the Constitution, the Monroe Doctrine, George Washington’s presidency, and a broad scope of public concerns during the 19th century.
McMaster has not written anything like “love ya” biographies of the so-called Founding Fathers.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2022 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Sea Runners
…it informs, it does not soar…
by Ivan Doig
–
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 | Jun 19, 2022 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Revolutionary War
more new learning…
Book review:
Empire of Liberty:
A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815
by Gordon S. Wood (b1933)
New York: Oxford University Press, Inc., 2009
Empire of Liberty is a finely detailed and well-informed examination of the early years of the United States.
You can trust Gordon Wood to give it all he has, and to give you a lot of new learning.
This 778-page volume is part of the Oxford History of the United States.
If you can’t read it all at once, pick it up again soon.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2022 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Sea Runners
…it informs, it does not soar…
by Ivan Doig
–
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 | Jun 13, 2022 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Politics, Revolutionary War
…before the so-called Founding Fathers…
Book review:
The Unknown American Revolution:
The Unruly Birth of Democracy
and the Struggle to Create America
by Gary B. Nash
New York: The Penguin Group: Viking, 2005
The Unknown American Revolution is chock full of facts you probably don’t know about the evolution of the revolutionary spirit in the American colonies.
Here’s a hint: the leather-apron men and other lower class members of what the elites contemptuously termed “the mob” had a lot to do with it.
Gary Nash gives a book full of details demonstrating that there was a whole lot happening in the decades before the shoot-out on Lexington Green and the wrangling in Philadelphia in June and July of 1776.
There were a whole lot more folks—men and women—involved in addition to the so-called Founding Fathers.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2022 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Comanche Empire
it’s the other story of the American West…
–
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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