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
A memorable report of a monthlong 1992 expedition to Peru, featuring daring, drugs, and despotism. BBC reporter Simpson (Despatches from the Barricades, 1991) loves a good story, and Peru—source of most of the world's cocaine and home of both the relentless Shining Path guerrilla movement and an army unburdened by procedural niceties—seemed like a natural place to find one. He planned, with a group of colleagues, to cover the drug problem and the political situation for the BBC and other news organizations. But before describing this trip he whets readers' appetites with engaging preliminary tales of a trip from Brazil to visit forest-dwelling Indians and his subsequent negotiations from London over the logistics of the Peruvian trip. Arrived in Lima, Simpson and his team learn that the Peruvian police have captured Shining Path leader Abimael Guzman. Simpson's interviews show the manhunt leader to be one of the government's few committed democrats, while President Alberto Fujimori, who has suspended the constitution, wriggles out of tough questions. Navigating Peru's coca-growing region, an area off-limits to foreigners, Simpson's team, aided by a brave Peruvian journalist and some rickety forms of transport, has several adventures: They take testimony about army human-rights violations, meet a former official willing to testify about army corruption, and escape some menacing local army potentates, whom they manage to film before fleeing. Amid the tension, there is macabre humor, as when a Peruvian journalist composes for Simpson a fawning letter asking to interview a local drug lord (``Our news...has 99 per cent credibility among the people of Europe''). Simpson leaves Peru after getting the country's vice president, Maximo San Roman, on camera calling Fujimori ``the front man'' for a regime linked with drug traffickers. A good yarn with an appealing protagonist that inspires sadness for the Peruvian people and much distaste for their government. (8 pages b&w photos)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-43297-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An angry, impassioned book from a journalist who has seen the Bosnian conflict at its worst. Vulliamy has been covering the war in the former Yugoslavia for the Guardian, winning several awards for his reportage, much of which has gone into this volume. After a pungent historical summary of the troubled nationalities that make up the population of former Yugoslavia, Vulliamy plunges readers headlong into a nightmarish war in which 85% of the dead are civilians, a war stained by concentration camps and genocidal violence. He describes a conflict in which a multiethnic Bosnian state has been caught in a territorial vise between two vicious and unprincipled neofascist states, one Croatian and one Serb; both, he says, are rabidly nationalistic and want to ``re-establish their ancient frontiers with modern weaponry in the chaos of post-communist eastern Europe.'' He describes formerly Muslim villages now ``gutted, charred and lifeless''; concentration camps full of men with skeletal bodies, ``alive, but decomposed, debased, degraded.'' Vulliamy harshly criticizes diplomatic cynicism, referring to the behavior of the European Community, the Russians, and the US as nothing less than a Munich-scale appeasement that has allowed the Serbs and Croats to blackmail, lie, and wheedle their way toward the dismemberment of Bosnia. He makes no effort to hide his distaste for the politicians who engendered the butchery or the diplomats who made it possible. The reporting and the writing are comprehensive and moving, and it is hard to imagine anyone coming away from this volume not feeling enraged and dismayed by events in Bosnia. If readers are seeking an objective and detached history of this conflict, this is the wrong book. However, it is one of the best books to date on the Bosnian tragedy. A powerful and important volume.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-11378-1
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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