An informative and agreeably anecdotal history of the Atlanta- based multinational that, despite the best efforts of archrival PepsiCo, continues to bestride the global soft-drink trade like a colossus. Drawing on a wealth of archival sources and personal interviews, CNN commentator Allen offers a generation-spanning account of how Coca-Cola Co. (which turned 100 in 1986) managed to achieve cultural significance as well as commercial success. While he covers much the same ground as Mark Pendergrast in For God, Country, and Coca-Cola (1993), Allen focuses to good effect on the individuals who have played leading roles in corporate affairs: founding father Asa Candler, a dour hustler who acquired the rights to Pemberton's Tonic, an obscure patent medicine that became the basis of a beverage empire; Robert Woodruff, a banker's son who did more than anyone to build the company's extraordinary consumer franchise; and Cuban-born Roberto Goizueta, the incumbent CEO who, notwithstanding a notable blunder with the flagship brand, has kept Coke on a fast upward track. As its subtitle suggests, Allen attributes Coca-Cola's accomplishments to dedication and merchandizing savvy, not to the exotic ingredients in a soft-drink recipe that's been altered a dozen or more times over the years. In this account, moreover, the company's stewards proved themselves alertly opportunistic during WW II, classically pragmatic when they became early backers of America's civil rights movement, astute students of political risk in any era or venue, and aggressive strategists in the ongoing cola wars. Allen effectively ends his coverage with Woodruff's death at 95 in 1985, touching only lightly on events of the past decade. An engaging audit of a corporate phenomenon that wisely eschews what-it-all-means analysis in favor of a vivid narrative that can speak for itself. (80 photos, not seen) ($30,000 ad promo; author tour)
Pub Date: Aug. 3, 1994
ISBN: 0-88730-672-1
Page Count: 496
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1994
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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