Two Washington, D.C., siblings, disillusioned with life and love, join forces to realize a sweetly successful venture.
In the early 1980s, a time the Park sisters recognized as one of “luxury and excess,” Frances (“Francie”) and Ginger (“Ginge”) opened their dream boutique sweetshop mere blocks from the White House. Though life became bittersweet since their beloved father passed away a few years prior, both women write of a steely resolve, a dedication to family and a passion for chocolate they’d inherited from their hardworking Korean parents. Becoming chocoholics “long before it was a diagnosis,” the sisters parlayed this lifelong adoration into a joint business plan, agreed on a name (based on a delectable double-chocolate brownie recipe) and set forth making “Chocolate Chocolate” thrive in the nation’s capital. But the road to profitability proved arduous as mouthwatering taste-tests failed to buffer a series of dilemmas including tedious location scouting, a contractor’s shoddy workmanship, bomb threats, a near-disastrous grand-opening party and months of flagging sales. With patience and diligence, Francie, Ginge and their doting mother eventually began to develop a steady, eccentric clientele of chocolate lovers. Sales flourished, bolstered by whimsical holidays and a flood of media attention, and the girls even managed a few dating adventures. Despite the experience of a string of Korean-inspired children’s books (The Have a Good Day Café, 2005, etc.) and a novel between them, their memoir develops a surprisingly rambling quality and boasts a generic narrative voice lacking the intimacy of a first-person perspective. Still, the Park sisters’ cheery adage remains the definitive take-away: “There are times when only chocolate can make a bad day better.” Smooth, soft-centered confection that goes down with a smile.
Pub Date: May 10, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-65293-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2011
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
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