by Richard Subber | Sep 21, 2023 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Power and inequality
who believes President Madison didn’t do it?…
Book review:
The Other Madisons: The Lost History of a President’s Black Family
by Bettye Kearse
Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020
253 pages
Bettye Kearse has written her convincingly detailed book about her family tradition that President James Madison is her relative, six generations back.
Her belief is that Madison fathered a son (Jim, a slave) with Coreen, a black slave cook in his household, and that James and Jim are in the long line of Kearse family grandfathers.
There is no objective proof of the Madison connection, but it’s way too easy to believe that this slave-owning president did what so many other white men did with so many of their slave women in the early 19th century.
I wonder how many “black” Americans have white ancestors?
I wonder how many “white” Americans have black ancestors?
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
“Many waters cannot quench love.”
Love will rise to meet you…
(what you hear is poetry)
Book review: St. Ives
by Robert Louis Stevenson
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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 | 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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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 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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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 | Jun 25, 2023 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Politics, Power and inequality, World history
domestic politics always gets in the way…
Book review:
The Ghost at the Feast:
America and the Collapse of World Order,
1900-1941
by Robert Kagan
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2023
669 pages
Kagan’s approach to writing history is fully respectable. He tells it straight, and he knows what he’s talking about.
The Ghost at the Feast is a stunning commentary on the politics (domestic and international) that guided and muddled America’s role on the world stage in the first half of the 20th century.
Prepare to learn more about our history that you don’t already know.
We didn’t always know exactly what we were doing.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
The Reader (Der Vorleser)
Not just a rehash of WWII…
by Bernhard Schlink
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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 | 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
–
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 | Mar 30, 2023 | American history, Book reviews, Books, History, Politics, Power and inequality
Tell yourself the truth…
Book review:
Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis
by Jared Diamond (b1937)
New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2019
Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel won a Pulitzer Prize in 1998.
502 pages.
Diamond delivers a knock-out with every one of his books. Upheaval is no exception.
Diamond fully backs up his frank and frightening assessment of the United States in its current crises.
America and Americans have many strengths, including our geographic stronghold and our democratic traditions. We’re facing many fault lines, not least of which is our increasingly paralyzing political polarization and refusal to embrace sensible compromise to get good things done for all Americans. Repeat for effect.
Upheaval is not a feel-good book. It is a call to action, with a credible road map and many reasons to fear our failure to face up to our crises.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
Book review: Shakespeare’s Wife
Germaine Greer went overboard a bit…
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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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