Like a Betty Crocker recipe: goes down easy.
Cheerful social history follows the career of General Mills’s long-lived celebrity spokeswoman.
First things first: Betty Crocker isn’t a real person. She was created, in an unwittingly brilliant move, by the publicity department of Washburn Crosby, makers of Gold Medal Flour, after a magazine contest brought in a flood of cooking questions to the company. The letters were answered, but the male publicity director certainly couldn't sign his own name to the responses; thus was Betty created. Her last name was given in honor of then-recently retired company director William G. Crocker, but her first name was chosen simply for its “wholesome” sound. From these simple origins, an empire grew—one supported by a large staff of cooks and home economists who were constantly testing recipes and looking for kitchen innovations. Betty was a radio pioneer, with a first show debuting in 1924 and, later, with her Betty Crocker Cooking School of the Air. She went to Hollywood in the ’30s to interview the stars, Marjorie Child Husted being the public face of Betty Crocker on these occasions. Betty assisted homemakers in stretching their budgets during the Great Depression and offered innovative ways to cook with rations during WWII. And while Betty Crocker was always firmly in the woman-as-homemaker camp, she advocated greater recognition for what was often thankless work, creating the Betty Crocker Home Legion. In the 1950s, Betty Crocker offered convenience foods—Bisquick, cake mixes—that matched the shiny new postwar prosperity. Though her popularity hit its high-water mark in the middle of the 20th century, she remains a force even in the General Mills of today. Marks excels in putting her subject in context, and alongside her historical account, she places numerous letters from women who wrote to Betty to ask questions or inform her about their lives.
Like a Betty Crocker recipe: goes down easy.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-6501-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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