by Richard Subber | Oct 31, 2024 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature, Theater and play reviews
slow-moving lava love…
Book review:
The Bridges of Madison County
Robert James Waller (1939-2017)
New York: Warner Books Inc., 1992
171 pages
The Bridges of Madison County was a notably popular new book. However, I’m aware that not everyone is a fan.
If you’re looking for highly stoked eroticism and high-rolling lives that throw off sparks when they touch, look elsewhere.
Frankly, for lots of tastes, good advice is: look elsewhere no matter what you’re looking for.
For me, Bridges documents the chance intersection of the putatively unremarkable lives of Francesca and Robert with all the heat and dazzle of slow-moving lava, without its destructive power. They come together, they permit each other to nourish their beautiful personae and they generate a passion that consumes without burning.
Robert likes to talk in philosophical kinds of ways, and Francesca likes to listen.
Francesca and Robert come together too late in their lives, after unbreakable commitments have been made to other cherished persons who, regrettably, are not like themselves.
I am drawn to the unsounded depths of their love and their absolute, cascading, undeniable recognition of each other as the unforgettable objects of their burgeoning desire.
They understand that they must be content with the short lifetime of their dalliance. They honor their love by deeply understanding its nature, and by accepting the permanent separation that their unyielding integrity requires.
Robert whispers to Francesca: “…this kind of certainty comes only once…”
The Bridges of Madison County is a love song, a courtship, a delicate primer on yearning, a too brief opportunity to know how it feels to be in love like that.
Give it a try.
p.s. Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep made the movie version with the same title in 1995 (rated PG-13, 135 minutes). You’ll love it if you like the book.
Waller’s book and the movie equally reveal the ethereal bond between Robert and Francesca. There is frank eroticism, with different physical and philosophical elements in the film and book, and a shared electric vitality.
The film and the book offer stylistically divergent life dramas that converge to a singular powerful love, and a perpetual loneliness that Robert and Francesca cannot minimize.
Give the film a try.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
Book review: A Cold Welcome
The culprit was global cooling,
500 years ago…
by Sam White
–
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 | Oct 25, 2024 | Human Nature, Reflections, Tidbits
mobilizing the English language…
“Success is not final,
failure is not fatal.
It is the courage to continue
that counts.”
Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
British Prime Minister during WWII
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Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
Book review: An Empire on the Edge
by Nick Bunker
The British wanted to win
the Revolutionary War,
but they had good reasons
for not trying too hard…
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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 | Oct 23, 2024 | Human Nature, My poetry, Poetry, Reflections
think a good thought…
Look up
Sure enough, another dawn
released another day,
a chance to see this old world
another way,
to take another step to futures,
a blink in time, oh sure,
but another whole day
to be alive,
to think a good thought,
to pause just once
to really spy the sallow clouds
and glance across the doughy sky,
and chance to see
that patch of personality
in the western span,
to think that, yes,
the clouds have their own time,
in separate beats,
and I can savor mine.
June 29, 2024
(Modified with feedback from Dee Bayne)
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My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
Book review: Saint Joan
a good one by George Bernard Shaw
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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”
Your comments are welcome—tell me what you’re thinking.
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by Richard Subber | Oct 3, 2024 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature, Theater and play reviews
bergin makes it worse…
Play review:
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
A 1962 play by Edward Albee
New York: Scribner Classics, 1962, 2003
243 pages
It’s not a feel-good play.
After you start to move again after you finish reading it, probably you’ll end up thinking that your life is better than you thought it was. George and Martha do a pretty good job of proving that hell on earth is possible.
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is almost a non-stop exaltation of how to be mean, sad, vicious, heartbroken, desperate, delirious, murderous, inhibited, ignorant, ambitious, empty, and longing, more or less all at the same time.
George and Martha, an aging couple on a rundown college campus, stage their terrible show for the benefit of a young professor, Nick, and his young wife, Honey, in the wee hours of a morning when each of them has something better to do, but isn’t doing it.
None of them make you think of the Cleaver family.
Arthur Hill was George and Uta Hagen was Martha in the first stage presentation in October 1962.
In the gritty 1966 film version, Richard Burton was George and Elizabeth Taylor was Martha.
Both of these productions are slam bang downers, just like the play.
No production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? will make you think of the Cleavers.
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Play review. Movie review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
Book review: Shantung Compound
Really, you see, they didn’t care much
about each other…
by Langdon Gilkey
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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 22, 2024 | Book reviews, Books, History, Human Nature, Power and inequality, World history
not everything is vanity
Book review:
The Bombing of Auschwitz:
Should the Allies have Attempted It?
Michael J. Neufeld and Michael Berenbaum, eds.
New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000
350 pages with extensive notes, bibliography, and index
The Bombing of Auschwitz: Should the Allies have Attempted It? is a retrospective, somewhat repetitive but broadly didactic selection of 15 arguments for and against the bombing of Auschwitz, with more than 40 primary source documents.
You’ll learn a lot about the terrible dilemma that the Allies faced—and some of them tried to ignore—during World War II. If the Allies had tried to bomb the crematoria, would Jewish lives have been saved? At what cost to the overall war effort?
Neufeld and Berenbaum offer 15 points of view, but, of course, the questions can’t be answered with full confidence.
Sadly, we can’t re-do the solitary track of history.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
Book review: Lord of the Flies
Never more relevant…
by William Golding
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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 12, 2024 | Human Nature, My poetry, Poetry, Reflections
my final future
now then…
The unknowable future
has been around for a long time,
it is,
it will be,
the mystery is what, not if.
I realize new truths.
I’m closer to my future
than I used to be,
I’m closer to my final future.
I think more about tomorrow,
I think more about today.
Sweet futures can become sweet nows,
the nows I can know.
I can choose my next now,
I do not know tomorrow’s future,
I will live it in good time.
May 11, 2024
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My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
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”
Your comments are always welcome—just tell me what you’re thinking.
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