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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
