An examination of how the A&P food stores dominated American retailing decades before Wal-Mart.
Levinson (The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, 2006, etc.) delves into the origin and growth of the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, known informally at "the A&P." It began as a little tea shop in New York City in the mid 1860s, the brainchild of businessmen George Gilman and George Huntington Hartford. But as the shop grew into several and then many, with far more diverse merchandise than tea, the Hartford family became identified as the scions of the A&P, eclipsing the Gilman name and accumulating massive personal wealth. Throughout the narrative, Levinson demonstrates how innovative retailing strategies and price-cutting to force out mom-and-pop competitors hurt local economies while simultaneously making food more convenient and affordable to purchase for individual consumers. The end result, the supermarket, counted as the fourth retailing revolution through which the Hartfords guided the A&P. In the 1890s, they had altered a tea company into a grocery-store chain. In the second stage, just before World War I, they changed the grocery business from a haphazard enterprise of uncertain profitability into a large-scale operation with costs and prices carefully monitored. The third stage began in 1925, as they instituted the concept of vertical integration to benefit from economies of scale and raise profit margins by increasing sales volume. Mom-and-pop businesses, championed by Texas Congressman Wright Patman, fought the increasing domination of the A&P, and President Roosevelt's antitrust lawyers also sought to diminish the giant retailer's oligopoly. But it was not until the deaths of the Hartford brothers that the A&P began a decline that Levinson considers surprisingly precipitous. The decade of the 1960s sealed the company's unhappy fate, as other supermarket chains, plus Wal-Mart, became ascendant. A well-conceived, lively history with obvious contemporary relevance.
Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8090-9543-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An authoritative guide leads an illuminating journey into the distant past.
A noted Egyptologist follows the search for burial sites.
Former director of the Egypt Exploration Society and president of the International Association of Egyptologists, Naunton has presented his research in several TV documentaries, most recently King Tut’s Tomb: The Hidden Chamber (2016). He makes his book debut with an insightful, informative, and beautifully illustrated overview of archaeologists’ quests to find the tombs of some of the most famous individuals of the ancient world—Imhotep, Nefertiti, Cleopatra, and the Macedonian leader Alexander the Great foremost among them—that so far have eluded discovery. Along with chronicling expeditions, Naunton provides colorful biographies of these major historical figures and the world they inhabited. The 19th-century craze for Egyptian antiquities resulted in major finds, but despite two centuries of efforts, much has not been revealed. Of the tombs that have been discovered over the years, the author notes that many have been found empty, plundered by robbers lusting after the considerable wealth buried with the mummified corpse. Some robberies, he speculates, were likely carried out by the same people who buried the deceased or by workers involved in the construction of a new tomb that opened accidentally into the old one. Naunton vividly describes the sumptuous riches of burial sites: In 1939, for example, a team under the direction of French archaeologist Pierre Montet discovered a royal tomb containing a “falcon-headed coffin of solid silver,” a solid gold funerary mask, a scarab of lapis lazuli, and objects made of other precious materials. The following year, his team discovered a mummy “wrapped in almost unimaginable riches,” including 22 bracelets, solid gold toe and finger rings, and jeweled weapons, amulets, and canes. While it seems mysterious that the tombs of famous individuals should remain hidden, Naunton suggests that ancient “waves of rebuilding,” sieges, geological changes, and recent redevelopment have caused sites to be obscured. The tomb of Cleopatra and, perhaps, Marc Antony, for example, may lie buried in the sea, off the coast of Alexandria.
An authoritative guide leads an illuminating journey into the distant past.Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-500-05199-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."
Pub Date: June 18, 1974
ISBN: 0671894412
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974
SEEN & HEARD
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