by Richard Subber | Jul 23, 2024 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature
talk a lot, pick a little…
Book review:
What the Robin Knows:
How Birds Reveal the Secrets of the Natural World
Jon Young
Boston: Mariner Books-Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012
241 pages
“Just as scientists have identified elements of human speech that reflect a speaker’s emotions, field experiments have shown that the calls of many animals provide listeners with information about objects and events in the environment. Like human speech, therefore, animal vocalizations simultaneously provide others with information that is both semantic and emotional.”
p. 105 from What the Robin Knows
The birds talk to each other. All species of birds and many species of other animals also listen to birds. Both prey and predator species listen to the birds. We can listen to birds.
I suspect that Young’s widely experienced detail must be a bit deceptive. I suspect there is more randomness than Young explains. If there weren’t some randomness, the predators would have figured out the patterns long ago.
…and some other thoughts: suppose the birds are really talking…what if your dog can talk and chooses not to?
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
“Fishering,” by Brian Doyle
…what meets the eye…
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 7, 2024 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature, Joys of reading, Language
Who doesn’t love Bertie Wooster?
I happened on a 1982 review of a biography of P. G. Wodehouse, and I can’t resist believing that the reviewer is a hatefully well-bred person.
Prof. Samuel Hynes very incautiously permits himself to label old P. G. as
” . . . the greatest trivial novelist in literary history . . .”
Egad.
Is he talking about Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (1881-1975), the remarkably gabby genius who created Bertie Wooster and Jeeves?
Is he talking about the guy who makes us love the incurably erratic Wooster? who makes us worshipfully respect the very properly domineering Jeeves who can’t hurt a fly, knows nearly everything and saves Bertie’s bacon every time? who makes us stiffen, suppressing cries of delight, as we absorb the adjectival artistry of the whole bloody Wooster/Jeeves madhouse?
Hynes goes so far as to declare that Wodehouse “created a world without real problems and without human depths.” If you’ve read any of Wodehouse’s work, you know that ain’t true. There’s a bit of Bertie’s passion and despair in all of us, and Jeeves divinely makes it possible for everyone around him to be human.
There’s just one word too many in Hynes’ summary of Sir P. G. Wodehouse: “the greatest trivial novelist.”
I think you can guess which one it is.
If you want to, click here to read all of Hynes’ comments about Frances Donaldson’s 1982 biography, P. G. Wodehouse.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
Home Team: Poems About Baseball (book review)
Edwin Romond easily hits another homer…
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 18, 2024 | Human Nature, Theater and play reviews
jungle story
Movie review:
Medicine Man
1992
PG-13
106 min
Medicine Man is a completely predictable story about a man and a woman chasing each other as they close in on finding a cure for cancer in the deep jungle. You can guess how it ends.
The real treasure of Medicine Man is watching Sean Connery create the very believable Dr. Robert Campbell character: a quirky, endlessly earnest, and somewhat sloppy bachelor who gets a bit mixed up when Dr. Rae Crane (Lorraine Bracco) shows up in his jungle laboratory to be his assistant.
Campbell has discovered—and mysteriously lost—the chemical component of a cure for cancer. Crane wants to help him find it again, but she’s “a girl” and that complicates the quest.
Campbell can’t escape the private and professional windmills that he fruitlessly charges, repeatedly. Crane very gradually realizes that adapting to a humanitarian mission in the deep jungle is not completely out of the question.
At the end, they’re happy about the way things turn out.
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Movie review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
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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 | May 21, 2024 | Human Nature, Reflections, Theater and play reviews
doing the right thing…
Movie review:
Arrival
2016, 116 min, rated PG-13 (brief strong language)
Arrival is a reflective experience of first contact with aliens who are not like us. These are aliens who, ultimately, want to do good, but the humans have to learn how to deal with this reality.
Amy Adams plays the linguist Louise Banks, and Jeremy Renner plays the physicist Ian Donnelly. They combine their robust talents to learn how to communicate with the aliens, and to try to convince their human superiors to do the right thing.
Banks and Donnelly fall in love. She saves the world. The aliens depart in peace. Her life is changed.
It’s a movie you can enjoy, no matter how many times you watch it.
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Movie review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
Book review: “The Gentle Boy”
The Puritans had a dark side…
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
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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 | May 12, 2024 | Book reviews, Books, History, Human Nature, Power and inequality, World history
energy is the bottom line…
Book review:
Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels:
How Human Values Evolve
by Ian Morris
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015
Contributors:
Richard Seaford
Jonathan D. Spence
Christine M. Korsgaard
Margaret Atwood
369 pages
Ian Morris says right up front that not everyone thinks he’s got it exactly right, but his story is an eye opener: how are human values and moral norms related to how human beings use energy?
Human beings need energy to survive, and obviously we need sources of energy.
The first human-like hunter-gatherers used energy that they could kill or pick up, and the first farmers planted their energy sources and domesticated a few animals, and now we depend (fatally?) on fossil fuel energy to live our lives.
Morris explains (attributes causes for) the different ways of “capturing” energy that are connected to how we feel about ourselves and how we deal with others.
If you think you’re satisfied with what you know about your code of values and the “do unto others…” stuff, then read Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels and learn some actual new stuff.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
Book review: The Map of Knowledge
it’s a slo-mo version of Fahrenheit 451
by Violet Moller
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 | Apr 23, 2024 | Human Nature, Theater and play reviews
you see it coming…
Movie review:
Body Heat
Some like it hot. If that’s you, you’ll like Body Heat (1981, rated R, 113 minutes).
Ned Racine (William Hurt in one of his most intense performances) is a caricature of a small town lawyer who doesn’t mind dealing with small town crooks. He also likes the ladies, and he gets snared by a big-thinking criminal lady that he can’t handle.
Matty Walker (Kathleen Turner is an archetype of ambitious, erotic, and nasty) wants to kill her rich husband. She picks Ned to help her do it.
Ned doesn’t figure it all out until he’s in a prison cell.
Matty takes the money and runs.
Body Heat has a lot of sweating, a lot of smoking, some humor (thank you, Ted Danson), and quite a bit of richly filmed hot love and fully expressed humanity in full view.
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Movie review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
Movie review: Same Time, Next Year
all-American adultery, oh yeah…
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many waters: more poems with 53 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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