by Richard Subber | Mar 10, 2023 | Book reviews, Books, History, Politics, Power and inequality, World history
an informed passivity…
Book review:
The Last European War:
September 1939-December 1941
by John Lukacs
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976.
The Last European War is a typical scholarly Lukacs work, with high clarity insights and no inhibitions about expressing his informed critique of the work of other historians.
Lukacs illuminates the events, the leadership and the popular sentiments of national populations during the period leading up to the start of World War II and the initial conflict prior to the entry of the United States into the war in December 1941. I point to the word “national” to note the emphasis explained by Lukacs in The Last European War, based on his interpretation that national sentiments were of paramount importance in shaping both the popular reaction to war and the popular attitudes toward the conflict.
A strong impression: The people and leaders who were living through this turmoil had only marginal appreciation of the effectiveness and impact of their actions. Nevertheless, the Nazis’ rise to power was significantly facilitated by the passivity (an informed passivity, not a state of ignorance) of too many individuals who didn’t advocate a morally-framed opposition.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
Book review: Saint Joan
the heart of a saint
by George Bernard Shaw
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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 | Feb 25, 2023 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, World history
engrossing, but not Larson’s best…
Book review:
Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania
by Erik Larson (b1954)
Crown Publishers, New York, 2015
430 pages
I’m a fan of Erik Larson, starting with The Devil in the White City. Dead Wake offers a similar reading experience in Larson’s “no frippery” prose, and with a consistent tension that makes it a page turner.
I confess that it’s hard to avoid the somewhat deadening spoiler in this story: from Page 1, we know how it’s going to end. Torpedoed by Germany’s U-20, the Lusitania went down in about 18 minutes. Larson’s approach is exclusively chronological; it’s not a bad thing, but I found myself almost thinking out loud—“let’s get on with it”—as I navigated through the certainly more than adequate number of anecdotal scenes involving the ill-fated passengers and their clothing/meals/flirtations/premonitions/self-assurances…
Full disclosure: to the end, I was rooting for passenger Theodate Pope to get some love in her life. On the other hand, I now know far more than I care to know about President Wilson’s mushy courting of Edith Galt (who became his second wife).
The thing is, Larson tells a great yarn here but he doesn’t invite the reader to grapple with it. It falls short of shattering, consequential drama. The sociable elements—the almost chatty context—of much of his tale seem to displace full engagement with the terror of the event, and the outcomes that it hastened.
Larson tries to invest this story with solemnity, respect, and understanding.
Dead Wake is a dutiful—indeed, engrossing—account, but it doesn’t quite rise to the occasion.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
Play review: A Doll’s House
Henrik Ibsen’s classic on abuse…
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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 | Jan 23, 2023 | Book reviews, Books, History, World history
a wonkish analysis of combat…
Book review:
Military Power:
Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle
by Stephen Biddle
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004
337 pages
Military Power is a fastidiously wonkish analysis of combat and military power.
Biddle makes his case for considering that “force employment,” i.e., combat doctrine and tactics, is at least as important in understanding the outcomes of battle as the count of who has the most guns and the biggest armies.
Earlier authors might have called it “leadership.”
Biddle offers remarkably detailed blow-by-blow commentary about the second battle of the Somme River in 1918, the Allies’ Normandy breakout in 1944, and Operation Desert Storm in 1991.
It’s not an easy read. Military Power will reward the reader who wants to know more.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 20232 All rights reserved.
Book review:
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
from the agile mind
of Arthur Conan Doyle
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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 19, 2022 | Book reviews, Books, History, Human Nature, Politics, Power and inequality, World history
swords, but no ploughshares…
Book review:
The Great Game:
The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia
by Peter Hopkirk
New York: Kodansha International, Ltd., 1992
564 pp
This was almost entirely new history to me. I guess I’m a typical Westerner—I don’t know much about Asia.
It’s not enough that the indigenous peoples of Asia have been squabbling and fighting with each other for centuries. The British and other Europeans and the Russians decided to get involved in the “Great Game” of trying to control and expropriate the riches of the East.
The Great Game tells it all.
It hasn’t turned out well at all.
Endless warfare is not the way to go about it. It don’t work.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2022 All rights reserved.
Book review:
The American Revolution: A History
The “Founders” were afraid of “democracy”…
by Gordon S. Wood
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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 | Dec 29, 2021 | Book reviews, Books, History, Power and inequality, World history
the traders forgot the common good…
Book review:
A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World
by William J. Bernstein
New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2008
Commercial long-distance trade in goods and people has been part of the human experience for about 5,000 years or so, and Bernstein offers plenty of detail about the highs and lows of this experience, and about the wealth that was accumulated by a few of the traders and the governments that backed them.
A Splendid Exchange makes it plain that, across the millennia, disease and plague has unavoidably followed trade routes. The various scourges that we nominally know about, like the Black Plague, were spread around by sailors and merchants who sailed on their ships.
Bernstein rather unconvincingly describes trade as an instinctive human enterprise. However, he clearly states that major trade and long-distance trade has been the vocation of the few and the powerful, and that rich merchants never have prominently attempted to serve any concept of the common good as they amassed their riches.
It’s an old story.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2021 All rights reserved.
The “dime novels” in the Civil War
Think “blood-and-thunder”…
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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 | Dec 22, 2021 | Book reviews, Books, History, World history
Does history have “causes”…?
War and Peace, Second Epilogue
Leo Tolstoy
Translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude
Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1988
Originally published in 1869
The Second Epilogue: Tolstoy’s reflections on history and its causes, and free will
Perhaps you know that Tolstoy appended two epilogues to War and Peace.
In the Second Epilogue, Tolstoy’s sometimes discursive style may impede the modern reader. It’s not boring, but it seems to be repetitious, and Tolstoy uses surprisingly mundane examples that may seem irrelevant to the modern reader.
It’s a Russian version of mid-19th century style. It seems to be relentlessly organized, using what Tolstoy presumably believed was an elaborate precision of language that tends to obscure and confuse his observations and conclusions.
I respect his ruminations about the nature and causes of history, the inevitability of historical events, and the possibly countervailing potency of human free will.
I confess that I am essentially unmoved by his conclusion that freedom of will and action is not a prime mover in human enterprise and human history.
I suspect that Tolstoy’s endorsement of “dependence on the external world, on time, and on cause,” and his acknowledgement of so-called “laws” that frame human history, is a manifestly inadequate description of the reality and the process of human history.
I suggest that Tolstoy went astray in his search for “cause” in human history.
Of course, there are forms and trends and ex post recognition of patterns in history. The longues durées exist, but they are only part of the story. There are recognizable, durable attributes of human nature. They are only part of the story.
Tolstoy almost forgets to mention the utterly contingent natures of historical reality, the historical process, human action, and the sequence of past events. One essential element of history is the continuous interaction of innumerable competing and complementary human behaviors and environmental circumstances.
History is the unpredictable single chain of events that actually happened, with many or most of their contingent antecedents forever unknown. There’s no way to write a neat and complete version of it.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2021 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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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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