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
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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