A pleasing chronology of candy through the ages.
The history of confections from a candy enthusiast.
The vision of sugary candies brings an immediate watering of the mouth and a sense of delight. Facing a midlife crisis, Hopkins (99 Drams of Whiskey: The Accidental Hedonist's Quest for the Perfect Shot and the History of the Drink, 2009) wondered how her happy-go-lucky, sugar-filled childhood had turned into the stress-filled life of the average American adult. By "indulging in the ultimate childhood fantasy" of taste testing while studying the history of candy, she hoped to overcome her midlife crisis and recapture some of the magic of her childhood. Her travels took her across the United States and Europe, with stops in Venice, Genoa, Edinburgh and London as she followed a trail of sweetness from honey-coated fruits to the modern Necco wafer. She discovered that modern "candy" had its origins in the apothecary and pharmaceutical shops where sugar was added to medicine to make it more palatable. Originally affordable only to the wealthy, sugar became common and inexpensive as explorers claimed land in the New World and planted sugar cane. With distress, Hopkins learned that the foundation of her sweet tooth rested on the backs of African slaves who tended the sugar plantations of Jamaica and Barbados. The Spanish introduced cocoa as a bitter, lukewarm, frothy drink, often with a "scum-like bubbling" on top. Bar chocolate made a late entrance into the sweetened-treat category after the invention of the water engine, which allowed a finer grind of cocoa beans. Hopkins also looks at the origins of large-scale conglomerates such as Cadbury and Necco, leaving readers to ponder the demise of small-scale confectioners for the sake of big business and profit.
A pleasing chronology of candy through the ages.Pub Date: May 22, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-66810-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
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 Yorker staff 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
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
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