Wide-ranging social history underpins a well-told, balanced account of the candy man, his business and his milieu.
Pulitzer Prize–winner D’Antonio (The State Boys’ Rebellion, 2004, etc.) provides a solid biography of the man whose name lives on through his eponymous chocolate bar.
And unlike his near-contemporaries, those evil robber barons, the name of Milton S. Hershey (1857–1945) remains fairly sweet upon the tongue. General consensus paints the candy maker as a Santa-like tycoon, a manufacturer of great wealth who was pleased to bestow his largesse—as long as you did things his way. In the mold of a Horatio Alger tale, his biography chronicles the rise of a poor maker of caramels to benevolent ruler of his own fiefdom. From stern Mennonite stock, he married a working-class Irish-Catholic woman with an ebullient personality and a shadowy past; their happy union was cut short by her premature death from syphilis. In business, Hershey was a trendsetter who through dogged experiment formulated confections that conquered the American market. Even before he was quite sure how to prepare milk chocolate (a mixture, basically, of oil and water), he confidently built a factory on his home turf, creating his very own town in the Pennsylvania countryside. He countenanced no cussing on the corner of Cocoa and Chocolate Avenues, maintained with the sales of nickel chocolate bars, individually gift-wrapped Kisses and crunchy Mr. Goodbars. The childless magnate’s favored eleemosynary object was the Hershey Industrial School for selected orphan boys—no slow learners, antisocial types or bedwetters. In his time, in his town, Mr. Hershey could be difficult. Quick to give with remarkable generosity, he was also quick to give sudden notice to employees who displeased.
Wide-ranging social history underpins a well-told, balanced account of the candy man, his business and his milieu.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-6409-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2005
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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