Richard's Updates en-US Thu, 08 May 2025 10:55:09 -0700 60 Richard's Updates 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Review1841005204 Thu, 08 May 2025 10:55:09 -0700 <![CDATA[Richard added 'American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804']]> /review/show/1841005204 American Revolutions by Alan Taylor Richard gave 5 stars to American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804 (Hardcover) by Alan Taylor
I started reading American Revolutions. I'm gratified that Alan Taylor poses an explanation for the "cause" of the Civil War that makes a lot more sense to me than the standard "it was a war against slavery." Taylor makes a case for a principal cause being the dispute over "...western expansion: whether territorial growth would commit the nation to free labor or, instead, extend slave society and its political power." That's a horse of a different color. I'm going to dig in to this one.
First, I decided to read Taylor's earlier book: American Colonies: The Settling of North America.
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]]> Review3772130749 Thu, 08 May 2025 10:50:31 -0700 <![CDATA[Richard added 'White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide']]> /review/show/3772130749 White Rage by Carol Anderson Richard gave 4 stars to White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (Hardcover) by Carol Anderson
Anderson offers her own eloquent understanding of the systemic racism that has polluted American culture since before the Civil War.
In White Rage, she says: “…all of us…must step out of the shadow of white rage, deny its power, understand its unseemly goals, and refuse to be seduced by its buzzwords, dog whistles, and sophistry. This is when we choose a different future.�
It will take a long time—beyond our lifetimes—but it’s time to get started.
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]]> Review4853210411 Thu, 08 May 2025 10:47:47 -0700 <![CDATA[Richard added 'Tales from a Free-Range Childhood']]> /review/show/4853210411 Tales from a Free-Range Childhood by Donald Davis Richard gave 4 stars to Tales from a Free-Range Childhood (Hardcover) by Donald Davis
Davis is a renowned storyteller, in person and in print.
He offers very believable recollections of his childhood in this exceptionally prosaic collection.
Tales from a Free-Range Childhood is a pleasing succession of reserved but spritely humorous accounts of the kind of joys and scrapes that you probably experienced, mostly.
Davis knows how to put it into words.
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]]> Review7553317018 Thu, 08 May 2025 10:40:22 -0700 <![CDATA[Richard added 'Washington Square']]> /review/show/7553317018 Washington Square by Henry James Richard gave 2 stars to Washington Square (Mass Market Paperback) by Henry James
Washington Square is a shallow dive into the meaning and the eternities of love.
Henry James offers 214 pages of sometimes desultory talk about love, and a couple kisses, and a touch—not an embrace—or two, and Catherine and Morris talk at each other about their concepts of love, but there are no awakenings, and no whispers melting on lips, and no warm zephyrs that fill the emptied spaces.
After Catherine and Morris have grudged their final words, Morris stomps away with his hat jammed on, Catherine returns to her knitting, and the reader is abandoned, adrift, still waiting to be filled by demonstrations of dearest love.
Henry James is a wordsmith, no dispute about that. The reader learns endearing and vastly frightening elements of the characters of the alleged lovers, and her curiously and completely unlikeable father, and Mrs. Penniman, the aunt who won’t butt out.
Henry James chases a plot, but doesn’t get his net around one.
The story line, for my taste, never ceases to be a prelude. There is no rip and no snorting in the pretend climax, and no satisfaction in the ersatz denouement.
If you want to argue that this presumed love story never gets started, and doesn’t really end, you get no argument from me.
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]]> Review7501650263 Sat, 19 Apr 2025 13:02:22 -0700 <![CDATA[Richard added 'Atonement']]> /review/show/7501650263 Atonement by Ian McEwan Richard gave 5 stars to Atonement (Paperback) by Ian McEwan
Atonement is a story of the profound sadness of a child. The sadness is a burden on several lives. McEwan invites the reader to learn to understand the life of a child who learns to understand that atonement can be a lifelong quest.
The child Briony knows she is a writer. She spends most of her life trying to understand how writing can be more than a fancy, and learning how to make it a substitute for real lives.
Briony, mature and nearing her own death, writes the final draft of her regrets for the childish impulse that unmade the lives of her beloved Cecilia and her beloved Robbie.
Briony learns that atonement can fill every space in a life, and she learns that atonement can be impotent.
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]]> Review7448827870 Sun, 30 Mar 2025 17:11:21 -0700 <![CDATA[Richard added 'The Awakening and Selected Stories']]> /review/show/7448827870 The Awakening and Selected Stories by Kate Chopin Richard gave 2 stars to The Awakening and Selected Stories (Mass Market Paperback) by Kate Chopin
There are no fireworks and little spark in Kate Chopin’s prose.
Her characters and her plots seem quotidian at best, and more like hum-drum.
In her time she was a ground-breaking writer of feminist themes, but her stories simply are not thrilling in the 21st century.
As I tried to read The Awakening, I realized that I was trying to imagine how it would have felt doing the same thing 125 years ago. I failed.
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]]> Rating834040954 Sat, 08 Mar 2025 16:54:43 -0800 <![CDATA[Richard Subber liked a review]]> /
Richard Subber liked jacob graham's review of The Fountainhead:
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
"couldn't agree less with rand on most anything, including many of her stylistic choices. but she can spin a yarn; i'll grant her that. plus, i just had to know what these rightwingers and libertarians are prattling on about."
]]> Review7387181633 Sat, 08 Mar 2025 16:51:31 -0800 <![CDATA[Richard added 'Small Things Like These']]> /review/show/7387181633 Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan Richard gave 5 stars to Small Things Like These (Hardcover) by Claire Keegan
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 knows “the worst was 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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]]> UserFollowing322451507 Sun, 23 Feb 2025 07:32:57 -0800 <![CDATA[Richard Subber is now following jacob graham]]> /user/show/62710814-jacob-graham Richard Subber is now following jacob graham ]]> Review7347756670 Sun, 23 Feb 2025 07:27:08 -0800 <![CDATA[Richard added 'The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War']]> /review/show/7347756670 The Demon of Unrest by Erik Larson Richard gave 5 stars to The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War (Hardcover) by Erik Larson
You’ll recognize the casually engaging prose and the dedicated storytelling style of Erik Larson. It’s a pleasure to read everything he writes.
Larson digs deep to explore the nature of the “demon of unrest� that made trouble for decades and wouldn’t stop provoking the evil sentiments and the violent politics that preceded the historic outbreak of the American Civil War in the Charleston harbor in April 1861.
The Demon of Unrest names and spotlights all the characters who played mostly behind-the-scenes roles as Lincoln and Davis and Beauregard and Scott and Seward and Ruffin and their well-known colleagues blustered and schemed and waited and welcomed and feared the seemingly unavoidable war to end slavery.
No matter how much you know, you’ll learn something more about the assault on Ft. Sumter by reading this book.
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