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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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