by Richard Subber | Jun 28, 2025 | American history, History, Human Nature, Politics, Power and inequality, Theater and play reviews
power brokers aren’t good guys…
Movie review:
All the President’s Men
It’s a good guess that you watched All the President’s Men (1976, rated PG, 138 min) a long time ago.
Now’s a good time to watch it again. You get to see Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford at work in their younger years, and you get to see the good guys win.
Bob Woodward (Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Hoffman) give workmanlike performances as they grind through the often mind-numbing work of bringing down a corrupt president and his corrupt henchmen. I don’t think any women were involved in the really bad Watergate business.
The drama is created as the “Woodstein” duo and Deep Throat and dubious/credulous Washington Post editors relentlessly push for the boring investigative legwork that ultimately reveals the frightening cabal of power brokers who will do close to anything to keep Nixon in office.
The good guys win. Mostly they didn’t fear for their own safety. Mostly they didn’t think they were heroic. Mostly they didn’t think the job was hopeless. Mostly they wanted to do the right thing.
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Movie review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Old Friends (book review)
Tracy Kidder tells truth about old age…
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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”
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by Richard Subber | Jun 17, 2025 | Poetry, Reviews of other poets, Tidbits
being a buttonhole…
“I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.”
Keep on doing what you can do.
quote from “Famous” by Naomi Shihab Nye (b1952)
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Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Book review:
Shakespeare: The World as Stage
The Bard was the lucky one…
by Bill Bryson
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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 | Jun 7, 2025 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature, Joys of reading
intensely human emotions…
Book review:
Small Things Like These
by Claire Keegan (b1968)
New York: Grove Press, 2021
118 pages
Much of Small Things Like These qualifies for an “ordinary” description, but the reader repeatedly is invited to experience such intensely human emotions that it’s troubling to turn the page and continue reading…
Bill Furlong, a coal dealer living a small life in a small town, rescues a forsaken girl, and understands that there is “fresh, new, unrecognizable joy in his heart,” but he dreads what is “yet to come…” The girl is a hapless pawn in an enduring evil reality.
Keegan knows how to tell the reader about that joy, in her smooth and enticing prose that creates credible people living credible lives in a small place that makes room for great hearts.
She gives us reason to imagine that more people are willing to do good.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Book review: Who Built America?
…including people
who got their hands dirty
by Christopher Clark and Nancy Hewitt
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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 5, 2025 | Human Nature, Joys of reading, Reflections, Tidbits
just the same…
“I do miss her,” he answered, and sighed again.
“Folks all kep’ repeatin’ that time would ease me,
but I can’t find it does.
No, I miss her just the same every day.”
Fisherman Elijah Tilley talks about his deceased wife, he calls her “poor dear,”
in Sarah Orne Jewett: Novels and Stories
by Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909)
The Library of America
New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1994
p. 477
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Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
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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 | May 29, 2025 | American history, Politics, Power and inequality, Theater and play reviews
the spadework for the 13th Amendment…
Movie review:
Lincoln
2012, PG-13, 150 minutes
The movie Lincoln is about Lincoln, and we don’t need to spell out his name. Daniel Day-Lewis gives a performance as the Great Emancipator that rings true on both the good side and the not so good side. Sally Field rather woodenly plays the role of Mrs. Lincoln, or, as she preferred, “Mrs. President.”
Lincoln was a politician—we tend to forget that. The subplot of the movie is the horse trading and the not-so-savory vote buying that went on in the runup to the successful vote on the 13th Amendment to abolish slavery. Lincoln’s right-hand men did what he asked them to do and what they knew he wanted them to do—and Lincoln finally did a bit of the spadework himself.
Lincoln is not a spectacular movie. It’s dark in many ways. It is profoundly historical, and the drama keeps peeking through the windows.
One bag of potato chips is enough.
By the way, Lincoln was born in 1809, when it wasn’t widely popular to give babies a middle name.
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Movie review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Book review:
John Eliot: “Apostle to the Indians”
…a righteous man of his times
by Ola Elizabeth Winslow
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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 | May 27, 2025 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature, Joys of reading, Language, Reflections
these characters are yearning, yearning…
Book review:
Victory
by Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)
New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., 1928
412 pages
It may be that it is enough to say about Victory that it is lush prose that wraps around your mind and leaves you sated at the end of every chapter.
Conrad’s style, I dare to say, is not for every modern taste. It is dialogue-rich. The action is spare. For me, the essential appeal of Victory is the reflective context of the characters’ state of mind: their imaginations, their aspirations, their candid self-assessments.
In Victory, there is enough honesty, enough resignation, enough disappointment, enough yearning to make you feel like you want to claim that your life is good.
At least, good enough.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
–
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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