This is the most
provocative book I’ve read in my adult life. It’s about prisoners of war
who could have lived an Enlightenment fantasy….
Read the full post on my new website:
Showing posts with label Books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Books. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 16, 2016
Tuesday, November 15, 2016
Book review: Literary Life: A Second Memoir
My review explores Larry McMurtry’s passionate
engagement with books….
Read the full post on my new website:
Friday, November 11, 2016
Book review: The Bridges of Madison County
A slow-moving passion that consumes
without burning….
Read the full post on my new website:
Tuesday, November 8, 2016
Book review: Address Unknown
Book review: Address Unknown
by Kathrine Kressmann Taylor
A friendship corrupted by Nazi hatred
in WWII. Two friends who couldn’t understand how to avoid mutual
self-destruction.
Read the full post on my new website:
Saturday, November 5, 2016
Book review: The Brothers by Janet M. Kovarik
The Brothers: good storytelling
I review The Brothers by Janet M. Kovarik, a dialogue-rich novel with
believable characters set in the American Civil War.
Read the full post on my new website:
Saturday, October 29, 2016
Rick Subber’s new website
Here’s a sneak preview of my new
website, check it out here:
It’s still under construction, but you
can read samples of my poetry and my blog posts on books and book reviews,
history, politics and some strange and wonderful stuff in the “Tidbits”
category.
In the near future I will say goodbye
to my three longstanding blogs—Barley Literate, History: Bottom Lines, and
Magister Librorum—and do all of my daily posting on the website, where
everything will be conveniently accessible from a single landing page.
I will manage the new website in tandem
with my dedicated Facebook page, click here to take a look at it—and please “Like”
the new Facebook page if you care to, I need 25 “Likes” to get access to some
advanced Facebook audience measurements (all aggregate stuff, no personal or
private information about individual persons, not even a little bit, not ever).
With appropriate humility and excessive
excitement, I mention that in the near future I will publish my first poetry
chapbook. Stay tuned!
Thanks again for your kind
consideration in reading my daily scribblings. I try to write something worth
reading every day.
Words, words, words—they can say so
much if we choose them carefully, and if we choose to listen....
Rick
Copyright
© Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.
Saturday, October 15, 2016
"The past is a foreign country..."
Book review: The Go-Between by L. P. Hartley
"The past is a foreign
country:
they do things differently there."
L. P. (Leslie Poles)
Hartley (1895–1972)
This is the celebrated
first line of The Go-Between, Hartley's novel of Victorian
romance and deception published in London in 1953. It can mean whatever you
make of it.
I take it as an
admonition….one must try to be aware of the unique and partly (perhaps
completely) inaccessible context that framed the actions and outlooks of those
who did things we think we're interested in…you know, it's not easy to think
and feel as the Romans did…
The 1970 movie with Julie
Christie and Alan Bates is a genuinely throbbing, set-your-teeth-on-edge
rendition of the book…give the book or the movie a try.
Copyright © Richard Carl
Subber 2016 All rights reserved.
Saturday, October 8, 2016
Reading in the rubble
Wars destroy bookstores, too, but human spirit can survive
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.
Wednesday, September 14, 2016
Book review: The Witches: Salem, 1692
Toil and trouble….and craziness
My book review of The Witches: Salem, 1692….a community gone crazy….
This post has been moved to
my website:
Friday, September 2, 2016
"Many waters cannot quench love."
Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson
(1850-1894)
Scottish novelist, poet, all-purpose
writer
Stevenson is famous for Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
St. Ives is unmistakable 19th century
prose, through and through—Stevenson's oeuvre is fastidiously lush, precise,
sophisticated, with deeply contextual character development and dialogue that
leaves me breathless with anticipation for more. Did I mention that I'm a fan
of 19th century prose?
There is a love interest, of course. It
involves a prim but worldly Scottish maiden and the eponymous French prisoner,
a nobleman whose service to Napoleon has ended in captivity in Edinburgh.
Stevenson allows le prisonnier, M. le Vicomte de St. Ives, to
confidently speculate on his prospects with the lady: "Many waters cannot
quench love."
Indeed. Read St. Ives to get the whole story.
Copyright © Richard Carl
Subber 2016 All rights reserved.
Saturday, August 20, 2016
Too many books, so little time
How
I wish the worst problem for kids could be
figuring out which book to read!
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016
All rights reserved.
Thursday, August 18, 2016
Early noodling about the Kindle
Amazon
released the first Kindle for sale in November 2007. You remember that, sure.
You
may not know that the concept for Kindle had been floating around for quite a
few years. A long time, in fact.
Here’s
a photo of the first prototype, admittedly in the very, very early stages of
development:
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016
All rights reserved.
Sunday, June 12, 2016
“…somewhere hot…”
Book review: A Pirate Looks at Fifty
Jimmy Buffett (b. 1946)
Ballantine Books, New York, 1998
Full disclosure: I’m not a Parrothead,
but I’m related by blood and marriage to gen-you-wine Buffett fans, so I take
the liberty of using familiar language, even though “the king of somewhere hot”
has never seen me and isn’t likely to in this earthly paradise….
A
Pirate Looks at Fifty is a
memoir-ish book by Himself, written almost 20 years ago, I spotted it in the
local library’s discarded book sale bin and I did the right thing.
Seems to me, for starters, no one
should ever discard a book full of Jimmy Buffett stuff, he’s just so much in
love with life and he is a magnet for vicarious attention, I dare you to read Pirate without getting at least a
fleeting urge to head for the islands and see the world through Jimmy’s eyes.
You don’t even have to read the whole
book (I confess, I didn’t), just read as much as gets the juices flowing and
then get on with your regular life, and you can dip into it again any time you
want. Buffett’s music and Buffett’s style are a buffet—grab what you want, anytime,
sing along as the spirit moves, and go back for more whenever….
You don’t even have to like margaritas to get the full, slobbering, belly laugh, hijinksed, hot damn but mucho mellow effect when you sing along with Jimmy about the Mexican cutie and the lost shaker of salt.
I dare you not to sing a couple verses and the refrain right now, you have to, really….
Copyright © Richard Carl
Subber 2016 All rights reserved.
Saturday, June 11, 2016
Whoa
This is a free country, mostly, sort of….so
you can more or less write whatever book you think must be written, and usually
you can read whatever you want….
I cherish these expectations, and so,
when I see stuff like this:
It makes me love my actual TO READ list
more and more.
Heck, I’ll eat a lobster, but….
Copyright © Richard Carl
Subber 2016 All rights reserved.
Saturday, May 14, 2016
The good old Dewey Decimal System
Betcha didn’t know that the Dewey Decimal
System was invented in 1873 by an Amherst College junior, who was, mostly
likely, a neat freak.
“Melvil Dui” was born as Melville Louis
Kossuth Dewey. In his youth, the lad was obsessed with frugality, efficiency, and
a “passion for order.” He acquired a
lifelong fixation on labor-saving devices and concepts.
There were some weird outcomes. In
thrall to brevity and efficiency, he adopted the name “Melvil Dui.” Yeah, you
get it.
He also persuaded the faculty at
Amherst to adopt his revolutionary system for cataloging, using a numeric
coding system which standardized the classification of books, created standard
categories and could be expanded as needed to accommodate new titles without
disturbing the orderliness of the system. Dewey was a student worker in Amherst’s
library, and he was intensely frustrated by the traditional hodgepodge of
library book classification and storage: a book could be shelved anywhere in a
given library, and would be more or less randomly located in every other
library.
By Dewey’s time, libraries had been
around for several hundred years. Admittedly, in the early days there weren’t
all that many books, but the Dewey Decimal System was long overdue.
I wonder why no one thought of it
before the nerdy kid came along.
Copyright
© Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.
Tuesday, May 10, 2016
Book review: American Crisis
Book review:
William M. Fowler, Jr., American
Crisis: George Washington and the Dangerous Two Years After Yorktown, 1781-1783
(New York: Walker and Company, 2011)
340 pages
American Crisis offers many
teaching moments to students of American Revolutionary history.
 |
| Washington enters Boston, 1783 |
The war didn’t end at Yorktown. British troops finally left New York City more
than two years later.
Some might speculate that the war effectively ended before that
dramatic capitulation at Yorktown in October 1781, because the British never
allocated the land and naval forces that were needed to force the colonials to
give up. Certainly, the hostilities did not end when Cornwallis threw in the
towel.
Fowler weaves military, political and diplomatic details together in
describing “the dangerous two years” between Yorktown and the official signing
of the peace treaty in 1783.
 |
| Parliament during Revolutionary War |
It’s difficult for us in modern times, so accustomed to light-speed
communications, to understand the frustration and limitations faced by military
commanders, Congress, king and Parliament in the late 18th century.
A round trip across the Atlantic could easily take two months or more.
Washington could communicate with his officers and Congress only as fast as a
horse could travel. British commanders in America were largely on their own in
making tactical and strategic decisions. Parliament, the king and American
diplomats negotiating peace had to act in perpetual ignorance of recent
military actions in North America.
The feckless sloth and impotence of the Second Continental Congress,
and (after 1781) the Congress of the Confederation, is a central theme in
Fowler’s account. American troops went unfed, unclothed and unpaid for long
months and years. The troops committed technically mutinous disobedience about
50 times, and Washington’s officers pushed close indeed to open revolt in their
largely unsuccessful efforts to get paid as the end of the war draw closer.
The principal obstacle to forthright action in the congress was its
inability to raise money: national taxes needed unanimous consent of the 13 states,
which mostly never happened, and the individual states mostly refused to pony
up funds from their own resources to support the army. Thus, “the dangerous two
years”—if the British had had the military capability to defeat Washington’s
army, likely it could have done so. Luckily for us, the king and his ministers
never beefed up their army and navy enough to win the war in North America.
In effect, Washington held them off until they gave up.
Fowler says it much better than I can.
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.
Monday, March 28, 2016
Book review: The First Congress
Book review: The First Congress: How James Madison, George Washington, and a Group
of Extraordinary Men Invented the Government
By Fergus M. Bordewich, Simon &
Schuster, New York, 2016
Alec D. Rogers very capably reviews
this new book at AllThingsLiberty.com. Fergus Bordewich offers a detailed look
at how the leaders of the former American colonies started buckling down to
making a government after the Constitution was ratified in June 1788. It was a
tough job. We’re still hard at work on it in 2016.
Some excerpts from Rogers:
“By necessity, of course, the new
Congress had to deal with virtually every fundamental question of
government. And while the concept of a two house legislature was not as
alien as the Constitution’s article II President, there were many procedural
questions that would need to be settled as the machinery began to
operate. Like President George Washington, its members were aware that
virtually everything they did would set a precedent for the new government.
They also knew that the eyes of the world were upon their republican
experiment…
“Bordewich takes us through the battles
that consumed the first Congress. A new tax system was imperative yet
controversial for its implications for federal-state relations as well as its
distributions of burdens on different sectors of the economy and regions.
The creation of the federal judiciary similarly aroused concerns about an
overbearing, costly federal government. Treasury Secretary Alexander
Hamilton’s plans for a national bank and the structure of the debt consumed
considerable time and raised profound questions regarding federalism and
separation of powers. Even the title by which the President would be
addressed turned into a deep philosophical question about the relationship
between the legislative and executive branches of the federal government and
the nature of the executive in a republic.”
Rogers also notes:
“In
1871, John Adams’s grandson Charles Francis Adams would observe that:
‘We are beginning to forget that the
patriots of former days were men like ourselves, acting and acted upon like the
present race, and we are almost irresistibly led to ascribe to them in our
imaginations certain gigantic proportions and superhuman qualities, without
reflecting that this at once robs their character of consistency and their
virtues of all merit.’”
I’ll add that readers today should keep
in mind that Charles Adams, grandson of the venerable John Adams, forgot to
mention that the Founding Fathers never called themselves “founding fathers,”
and they mostly weren’t buddies, and mostly they were affluent white guys
(mostly lawyers) who were inclined to dabble in politics or who seriously
sought political power.
Human nature doesn’t change in the short
space of 240 years or so.
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016
All rights reserved.
Sunday, March 27, 2016
The sinking of the Lusitania
Book review: Dead Wake: The Last
Crossing of the Lusitania
My review of this Larson thriller, the
consistent tension that makes it a page-turner….
This post has been moved to
my website:
Monday, February 8, 2016
Check it out!
The next time you walk past a library,
don’t walk past it….
Copyright
© Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.
Friday, February 5, 2016
Yeah, a blanket fort
Did
you make one of these when you were a kid?
I
did. Many times.
If
you didn’t make one when you were a kid, you can make up for that by helping
your grandchildren make one.
Today.
Or make one for yourself.
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016
All rights reserved.
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