by Richard Subber | Oct 19, 2024 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature, Joys of reading, Tidbits
give your arm to a loved one…
Book review:
The Gifts of Imperfection:
Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be
and Embrace Who You Are
by Dr. C. Brené Brown (b1965)
Center City, MN: Hazelden, 2010
135 pages
Dr. Brown offers this “tough lesson” from her life:
“How much we know and understand ourselves is critically important,
but there is something that is even more essential to living a Wholehearted life:
loving ourselves.”
This book moved me to think about changing the way I think about life, and my life.
Give yourself a gift: take time to read The Gifts of Imperfection and then D.I.G. into your life.
That is, start consciously thinking about wholehearted living and tell yourself a lot of truth, and then:
Get Deliberate about doing the right things for you, in all your glorious imperfections,
Get Inspired to acknowledge what you’re doing in all your loving relationships, and
Get Going, take the next steps in actually living a love affair with yourself and all you can be…
…and don’t mind if you stumble now and then, and give your arm to a loved one now and then…
…and have good intentions, and take the agony and the ecstasy as they come.
Quote is from The Gifts of Imperfection, p. xi.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
Book review:
American Scripture:
Making the Declaration of Independence
…basically, it’s trash talk to King George
by Pauline Maier
–
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 | 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 1966 film version, Richard Burton was George and Elizabeth Taylor was Martha.
Both 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
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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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 | 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.
“…a merely decent human being.”
May Sarton, on the lookout…(quote)
–
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 | Sep 8, 2024 | Human Nature, My poetry, Poetry, Reflections
the thin line of future…
another day
…the distant horizon moves closer,
it creeps, of course, or sidles,
there is no romp, nor dash,
one need not notice every day,
it is no rush to change the way
we live enough in each bright hour
to fill our time,
we may look up, forsooth,
and see the thin line of future
shuffling nearer,
seeming clearer,
waiting for the clarion of tomorrow.
June 3, 2024
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My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
Movie review: Same Time, Next Year
all-American adultery, oh yeah…
–
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 | Sep 3, 2024 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature
the sane and the duly goggled
Book review:
Character and Opinion in the United States
by Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás
[George Santayana (1863-1952)]
Spanish philosopher, poet, novelist
Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956 (first published 1920)
Santayana wrote this book in 1920 after he had left the United States for good. He had taught in the philosophy department at Harvard from 1889 to 1912. He returned to Europe, taught at the Sorbonne in Paris, and finally settled in Italy for the remainder of his life.
Much of the book is based on a series of lectures he delivered to British audiences after leaving America. In the Preface to Character and Opinion he says “Only an American—and I am not one except by long association—can speak for the heart of America. I try to understand it, as a family friend may who has a different temperament.”
Santayana took his own sweet time to take a look at the people around him in the United States, and to make his own unhurried assessment of their characters and of their manifestations of human nature.
For example, he gave respectful recognition to “…the intellectual cripples and the moral hunchbacks…”—not otherwise explicitly defined—who, notwithstanding their possibly dubious claim to respect, may nevertheless be the beneficiaries of “heavenly influences.” You can make your own determination about the prospective positive impact of such influences. I think Santayana’s point was that we do not fully know the prior byways or the future trajectories of another person’s life.
Moreover, Santayana distinguishes the cripples/hunchbacks and their (presumptively enlightened) presumptive betters—“…the thick-skinned, the sane and the duly goggled…”
These goggled elites are admonished to be wary of their limitations in discerning the realities and the frequency and the potency of “heavenly influences.”
I guess I have, perhaps smugly, collaborated with Santayana in a more than marginally self-satisfied effort to say something like:
“Give the other fellow a break.”
Think about it for another minute.
Here endeth the lesson for today.
Source:
Character and Opinion in the United States, p. 46.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
Boz indeed! Sketches by Boz
Charles Dickens delivers,
in a fastidiously literary kind of way…
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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