An intriguing look at a delicacy with a long, complex backstory.
A historical and personal look at women and their relationship with chocolate over the centuries.
Although many in the modern world consume chocolate regularly, how many stop to consider its long past? This book does so, and specifically addresses the roles that women have played in its history. Author and philanthropist Spenuzza begins her survey in ancient Ecuador, where it’s reported that archaeological teams have uncovered 5,300-year-old cacao-tinged vessels. The book includes a number of fine, telling details; for instance, it’s explained how records from the Inquisition in Mexico reveal women concocting potions, often using chocolate, in attempts to achieve magical ends. After a look at the ancient markets of Mesoamerica, where traveling merchant women played a prominent role, the book tackles Europe, and offers information that’s less gender-specific. Chocolate reached that continent sometime in the 16th century, the book notes; by 1544, the “stamina-enhancing benefits of chocolate were acknowledged by the Spanish.” Not that chocolate was immediately accepted by all that encountered it: Catholic theologians debated whether the substance should be considered a food or a drink. With time, however, chocolate would become loved by French royalty, commonplace in colonial America, and a fetishized foodstuff in the modern era. The author includes personal anecdotes among the historical information; she has, during many years of travel, always kept an eye out for “any nugget of new chocolate information,” she says. Overall, there are plenty of juicy tidbits here, often well referenced. Other points are, however, of limited interest and rather vague. For example, there’s a brief anecdote about a woman who arrived in New York City in 1885 with 10 pounds of chocolate; her luggage was detained and destroyed in a fire, resulting in a lawsuit. However, the tale doesn’t convey much about its setting or even the woman involved in it, which seems like a missed opportunity. Nevertheless, the book does enticingly explore how an incalculable number of lives have all been influenced by a now-common food.
An intriguing look at a delicacy with a long, complex backstory.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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