A book brimming with intelligence and compassion.
Rowbottom chronicles her relationship to a legendary American food brand and the dark underside of its history.
Jell-O was the author’s “birthright.” Purchased by her mother’s great-great-great-uncle in 1899 for $450, the company was sold for $67 million two decades later. Jell-O gave the maternal side of Rowbottom's family unprecedented access to money, privilege, and power. At the same time, the wealth also seemed to bring family members “all manner of…misfortune,” including alcoholism, cancer, and suicide. Her mother, Mary, believed that her own problems and health crises had come about as a result of this family curse, so she “rarely ate the stuff.” The author begins the story with her grandmother Midge, who dreamed of becoming a journalist but instead found herself saddled with a traditional family life—which Jell-O celebrated in its many advertisements—that left her feeling unfulfilled. Growing up during the 1950s and ’60s, her daughter Mary longed for life as an artist. However, the pressures for her to conform to traditional female roles ate away at her resolve, pushed her into a series of unhealthy relationships, and destroyed her well-being. Determined to understand both the Jell-O curse and her mother’s emotionally fraught past, Rowbottom researched not only her family’s troubled history, but also the history of Jell-O itself. She looked at how ad campaigns throughout the 20th century used Jell-O to prop up ideals of womanhood that either enforced ideas about women as domestic caretakers or made them feel guilty about “careers outside the home.” The author also explores the medically inexplicable ailments that not only befell her mother, but also—as late as 2011— young girls living in LeRoy, New York, the birthplace of Jell-O. Rowbottom delivers a moving memoir of a daughter seeking to understand her mother, family, and the place of women in American society, and the narrative also serves as a thoughtful, up-close-and-personal feminist critique of a cultural icon.
A book brimming with intelligence and compassion.Pub Date: July 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-51061-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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