Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Thursday November 11, 2010
|
CHOCOLATE WARS: The 150-Year Rivalry Between the World's Greatest Chocolate Makers
Deborah Cadbury
Public Affairs
ISBN 978 1 58648 820 8
348 pages
$27.95
Reviewed by Carolyn See, who reviews books every Friday for The Washington Post
Once upon a time in a small Swiss town in the middle of the 19th century, a boy was born who wouldn't take his mother's breast. As he weakened, death seemed inevitable. The desperate young father approached a neighbor who had been working for years to perfect a substitute for mother's milk: powdered cow's milk, mixed with a little cereal. The father took the formula home and soon "came the sounds the distraught parents had so longed to hear: normal suckling from a contented baby. The milk lived up to its promise."
The man who had been tinkering for so many years with his baby formula was Henri Nestle, who would go on to become an internationally known chocolate magnate. The young father, Daniel Peter, had been experimenting with milk and chocolate for years in another way: "His plant was open round the clock; he made his dark chocolate confections during the day, and at night he experimented with different ratios of milk powder and cocoa powder." Friends told him it was impossible to make a decent milk chocolate bar. "I did not lose courage," he said, "but continued to work as long as circumstances allowed."
These are just two of the intersecting characters in an amazingly appealing two-century-long story of how chocolate came to be so important in our modern world. In particular, "Chocolate Wars" follows the history of the British Cadbury chocolate company, owned by a couple of extraordinarily decent and virtuous Quaker brothers, George and Richard Cadbury, who disdained the callous and ruthless business practices of many of their Victorian rivals, put the welfare of their workers first and developed a series of marvelous chocolate products as well.
Their story ends sadly: Earlier this year the business was ignominiously bought out from under their descendants by the very tough Irene Rosenfeld, the Queen of Kraft Foods. Chocolates once lovingly assembled in "Fancy Boxes" by industrious damsels and described by critics as "the most exquisite ever to come under our notice" are now deprived of any lingering elegance by the American manufacturer of Velveeta Cheese, Miracle Whip and a "boxed macaroni and cheese dinner." The two grandsons of George Cadbury, Sir Adrian and Sir Dominic, "described the news quite simply as 'a tragedy.'"
But between the sellout to Kraft and the beginnings of the business in 1824 in a little tea and coffeehouse in Birmingham, England, that belonged to John Cadbury, the enterprise evolved through nearly two centuries of espionage, exploration and the creation of things that hadn't yet been seen on this earth. In the middle of the 19th century, chocolate was almost nothing like the product we think of today. Manufacturers knew it had to be good for something, but they didn't know quite what.
In the early days, when chocolate beans were roasted and ground, there remained too much cocoa butter to contend with. Manufacturers didn't know how to get rid of the excess fat. As a hot drink, cocoa was greasy, gritty and unappetizing. The first chocolate bar didn't appear in Britain until 1847, offered by the Fry brothers, who were among England's foremost Quaker candy makers, but it was hard, bitter and close to inedible. The Cadbury brothers struggled, along with their English Quaker rivals, for a way to make the stuff palatable. At one point they even added tree lichen to their product and dubbed it "Icelandic Moss," so it might sound good for English health.
All of this stuff was brought into being by real, actual striving human beings: Rodolphe Lindt, C.J. Van Houten, Domingo Ghirardelli, Milton Hershey and, of course, Nestle and Cadbury. Not only were these people making up products as they went along, they were marketing them in Africa and everywhere else in the world.
The author here, Deborah Cadbury, a relative of the family, has done a wonderful job conjuring up visions of the Victorian age. The archives she draws on are full of nostalgic memories of the two young bosses making sure that their "industrious damsels" changed out of their wet shoes if they walked to work in the rain. The Cadburys revolutionized business practices by building a "fairyland factory" outside of Birmingham to give their workers the advantages of fresh air. There was room for cricket, rose gardens and swings for the ladies.
This is a delicious book, seductive as a tray of bonbons, a Fancy Box in every way.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
|
| Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top |
CORRAG
Susan Fletcher
Norton
ISBN 978 0 393 08000 1
366 pages
$24.95
Reviewed by Ron Charles, the fiction editor of The Washington Post Book World. He can be reached at charlesr(at symbol)washpost.com.
Like Christine O'Donnell, none of the 20 people executed during Salem's infamous spasm of paranoia was a witch. Historians have offered a thick brew of competing explanations for what went wrong in that prosperous seaport around 1692. Belief in witchcraft was waning but still widespread, even among leading scientists (wander beyond Isaac Newton's writings on gravity, and the man sounds like a loon). Still, what struck the match that burned through Salem and those surrounding towns? Was it displaced fear of Indian attack? Or the rising tension between the town and the village? Or a hallucinogenic mold that infected their rye?
To my mind, feminist historians have provided the most useful analysis of the witchcraft hysteria that raged across the early modern period. These scholars point to a pattern of misogynistic accusations that clung to the trials like warts on a toad. Women who possessed unusual knowledge (of herbal cures, for instance), women who had sharp tongues, women who expressed their sexuality outside the bounds of traditional roles -- in other words, the same kinds of bold females who continue to unnerve us today -- risked being accused. True, we're not collecting dry sticks in the town square anymore, but as Meg Whitman learned earlier this month, powerful women still get burned with old w-word curses.
The injustice of such hate-fraught labels and the burden they impose are the themes of Susan Fletcher's third novel, a stirring historical romance coming next month called "Corrag," which is a finalist for next month's Rhys Prize for young writers. In 1692, the same year our sophisticated New England ancestors were busy hanging each other on spectral evidence, a more violent, government-sanctioned massacre took place in Glencoe, in the Highlands of Scotland. This tragedy and its murky political context won't be familiar to many Americans, but Fletcher fills in the details gracefully as she tells the story of a strange young woman caught up in the bloodshed.
Although she presumes too much on her readers' patience, Fletcher, who won the Whitbread Award for her first novel, "Eve Green," can be an alluring and poetic writer. The first chapter opens in a fetid Scottish prison where young Corrag crouches in chains preparing to be burned at the stake. Horrible as that prospect seems, it doesn't surprise her too much. After all, her grandmother was drowned as a witch, her mother was hanged as one, and the labels "hag," "Devil's whore" and "witch" have slapped Corrag since she was a little girl.
The story of how she arrived at her death sentence spools out as a prison testimony delivered over many days to Charles Leslie, a Catholic follower of exiled King James. Leslie suspects that William of Orange was involved somehow in the Glencoe massacre, and he's traveled to Scotland to investigate the crime -- and use it, he hopes, to discredit the Protestant government. Corrag, the vile, birdlike creature accused of witchcraft, appears to be the only witness, and so he swallows his revulsion -- "Any word, even a witch's, is a better word than none" -- and agrees to hear the entire story of her life to learn its shocking final episode.
The novel alternates between Corrag's tale and Leslie's devout letters to his wife about what he's hearing. I wasn't initially convinced that we needed his prissy updates, particularly when he had little to do but repeat what Corrag had just described or -- worse -- when he fell into the role of the novel's internal publicist, telling his wife how fantastic Corrag's story is, what a bewitching narrator she is, how effectively she brings the land alive. That's all true, but I kept muttering, "Show, don't sell." Nevertheless, he eventually won me over, and despite his buckle shoes, he becomes an interesting character in his own right, with passions just as strong and ennobling as Corrag's.
But clearly, the story belongs to her. Pushed out into the forest at 15 to avoid her mother's fate, Corrag begins her "galloping life" living off the land and falling in with the rough folk who are already fading into the mist of legend. She's a lover of all living things and a walking natural pharmacy, which comes in handy when she needs to prove her worth among lawless bands. We know where Corrag's tale is headed, but as Charles Leslie notes, "Her talking is like a river -- running on and bursting into smaller rivers."
I like my late 17th-century characters to sound a bit more antique, a little more removed from the colloquial patter of modern English. And a few too many New Age affirmations -- "The truest magick in this world is in us" -- sit like little globules of fat on the poetry of Corrag's narration. But she's got a great set of lungs for the kind of romantic incantations we don't hear much anymore outside of beer commercials: "I wanted blowing skies. To be where wolves still called," she says. "Where the people are wild, and the trees are wind-buckled, and there are lochs which mirror the sky. Where men live crouching down, waiting. Where I might live as I am." If this doesn't make you want to rip off your shirt and run out onto the dew-covered glen, move along to one of those many novels about middle-aged New Yorkers sighing over bad brie.
What's surprising is how puritanical this story remains even after Fletcher's young heroine makes contact with the doomed MacDonalds in Glencoe. Corrag arrives gowned in spider webs and twigs, and the sparks between her and Alasdair, the chief's son, could set the fields ablaze. Alasdair flashes blue eyes, of course, and thick legs "from a life of hills and riding hard," and his hair is "like the wet, autumn hillside -- old ferns, damp heather." (Clearly, I'm using the wrong shampoo.) He's got the right physique and stamina, but for some reason Fletcher won't push these two loamy lovers into Diana Gabaldon's lusty milieu. Alas, nobody's kilt gets wrinkled here. Even if you respect Fletcher's restraint, it's a tactical risk that leaves her novel awkwardly stranded betwixt the audience for literary fiction and the legion of romance readers.
In any case, the final section of the novel charges along with considerable drama and outrage. Despicable villains insinuate themselves into the MacDonalds' homes, and a coven of strange old hags straight from Shakespeare's Scottish play enter stage left to spin oblique prophesies.
In the end, it's not so much the assassins or the flames Corrag wants to escape as the old slur. "I'd dragged witch all my life," she tells Leslie. "All people have a certain creature in their head, when they hear it -- a woman, mostly. Pitch-dark and cruel, crooked with age." Corrag can't cast any spells to protect the people who took her in, but roused to her fiery height, she sweeps out a lot of the old cliches about witches and casts an enchanting spell in favor of bold women everywhere.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
|
| Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top |
THE CONFESSION
John Grisham
Doubleday
ISBN 978 0 385 52804 7
418 pages
$28.95
Reviewed by Maureen Corrigan, who teaches literature at Georgetown University, is the book critic for the NPR program "Fresh Air"
"The Confession" is the kind of grab-a-reader-by-the-shoulders suspense story that demands to be inhaled as quickly as possible. But it's also a superb work of social criticism in the literary troublemaker tradition of Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle." The novel's target -- the death penalty and its casualties -- derives from John Grisham's other life as activist and board member for the Innocence Project, an organization that fights to exonerate prisoners it deems wrongfully convicted.
For more than a decade, in his novels ("The Chamber," "The Innocent Man") and on editorial pages, Grisham has ruminated over the efficacy and morality of the death penalty. "The Confession" bangs the gavel and issues a clear verdict. As an advocacy thriller, it will rile some readers, shake up conventional pieties and, no doubt, change some minds. Whatever your politics, don't read this book if you just want to kick back in your recliner and relax.
The novel opens with a classic noir situation in which an ordinary Joe finds himself suddenly thrust by fate into a nightmare. In this case, our flummoxed hero is the Rev. Keith Schroeder, pastor of a Lutheran church in Topeka, Kan. Sitting in his church office one cold morning, Keith is paid a visit by a monster. Travis Boyette is a convicted felon, out on parole, whose rap sheet for sexual assault is as long as a fresh roll of yellow "crime scene" tape. Boyette tells Keith that he's dying from a malignant brain tumor and that he (maybe) wants to confess to the abduction, rape and murder of Nicole Yarber, a high school cheerleader from the small town of Slone, Tex., who disappeared almost 10 years ago.
After a couple of days of agonized dithering, Boyette shows Keith convincing proof of his guilt and the unlikely duo hatches a plan of action: If Keith drives Boyette to Slone -- and, thus, becomes his accomplice in breaking parole -- Boyette will confess to the authorities and take them to the spot where he buried Nicole's body. By the time the two men pile into Keith's clunker for the ultimate road trip from hell, speed is of the essence. In less than 24 hours, Donte Drumm, a former classmate of Nicole's, will be put to death for a murder he didn't commit.
The most harrowing sections of this 10-fingernail-biter of a novel are the flashbacks to Donte's arrest; the confession that was beaten out of him by frustrated Slone cops; and the chronicle of the years Donte has spent on death row, trying to clear his name and hold onto his sanity by reading the Bible and re-imagining his plays from his days as a Slone High football star. Here's how Grisham's narrator describes Donte's reflective frame of mind on what's scheduled to be his last day on Earth:
"You count the days and watch the years go by. You tell yourself, and you believe it, that you'd rather just die. You'd rather stare death boldly in the face and say you're ready because whatever is waiting on the other side has to be better than growing old in a six-by-ten cage with no one to talk to. You consider yourself half-dead at best. Please take the other half. ...
"You count the days, and then there are none left. You ask yourself on your last morning if you are really ready. You search for courage, but the bravery is fading.
"When it's over, no one really wants to die."
Add to the excruciating tension of this situation the issue of race: Nicole was white, Donte is black. Agitators on both sides of the racial divide will burn and batter Slone, Tex., to the ground if Donte's execution goes through -- or doesn't. His defense team, led by exactly the kind of obsessive-compulsive egomaniac lawyer anyone would want in this horrific case, is working frantically on last-minute appeals. The governor of Texas, though, prides himself on his record of ignoring clemency approvals from his parole board and pushing through executions: "He loved the death penalty, especially when seeking votes." As Donte counts the minutes left to his life, Keith and his ghastly passenger race down country roads toward the defense lawyer's office.
There are plenty of sickening twists and turns to come. It's enough to say that Grisham doesn't spare his readers or himself from gruesome experiences or hard questions. At one crucial point in "The Confession," Keith is forced to ask himself whether he would approve of the death penalty if Boyette, instead of Donte, were scheduled to receive a lethal injection of muscle relaxer to stop his heart. By the time you finish reading this book, you may well find that your answer, like Keith's, is different from the one you would have given before this darkly brilliant narrative began.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
|
| Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top |
A LILY OF THE FIELD
John Lawton
Atlantic Monthly
ISBN 978 0 8021 1956 8
381 pages
$24
Reviewed by Gerald Bartell, an arts and travel writer who lives in Manhattan
If the previous seven installments in John Lawton's Inspector Troy series haven't made the point adequately, the eighth, "A Lily of the Field," makes it again, and solidly: Lawton's thrillers provide a vivid, moving and wonderfully absorbing way to experience life in London and on the Continent before, during and after World War II.
At the core of this case is a murder that summons Troy from Scotland Yard to London's Northern Line Underground, where someone shot and killed a man on a platform. Delectable clues -- lumps of gray mashed potatoes, a ruby attached to a tiny Faberge pistol -- come straight from the Agatha Christie playbook, as does the crisply written investigation that follows.
But like its predecessors, "A Lily of the Field" offers far more than a clever, intricate, golden age mystery puzzle. In fact, Troy's investigation of the Underground murder doesn't take center stage until the book nears midpoint. The book's first half follows the suspenseful narratives of a gallery of characters the reader comes to care about greatly as they face the oncoming war.
Among them are Karel Szabo, a Hungarian physicist at Heaven's Gate Internment Camp on the Isle of Man; Viktor Rosen, who teaches piano and cello in Vienna; and Meret Voytek, one of his students.
Meret is arguably the most arresting figure of all, especially since her responses to the rise and fall of the Nazis become the book's sobering theme. A headstrong teenage prodigy, she joins the Vienna Youth Orchestra. Even after the Nazis overtake Vienna and Jewish members of the orchestra begin to disappear, Meret, who is not a Jew, responds to what is happening as "something seen reflected in a shop window." Then the Nazis shatter that shop window. They snatch her from a streetcar because she was sitting beside a friend who had been fighting the SS. With other prisoners, she endures a harrowing train journey and then the horrors of Auschwitz.
By this point, Lawton has the reader in his grips, wondering how he'll fuse the disparate plot strands, which also include Szabo's journey to New Mexico to work on the atomic bomb, and connect them to the shooting on the Underground. It's greatly satisfying, then, to follow along as Lawton ties everything together with expert timing, breathtaking revelations and one quick, perfectly judged, genuinely frightening action scene that punctuates the ending.
But even more than Lawton's storytelling skill, it's his gray-toned vision of postwar London that unifies the work. In the city on the Thames in 1948, whatever joy greeted the end of the conflict has dissipated, and whether the suffering and sacrifice have led to a better world is a disturbing question. Rather than relying on spoils, Londoners scrape by on rations. The fear of Germany's V-2 rockets has been replaced by a far greater threat, the Soviet Union's atomic bomb. In the air hangs smog from "the foul mixture of swirling Thames mist and a couple of million belching coal fires." Under this miasma, the characters stand bewildered.
Troy's brother Roderick searches for meaning behind the tragic, war-related loss that ends the story: "I want something redeeming in this," he says. The inspector, who has seen too much, finds nothing to reply. It's left to Ruby, a prostitute who works outside Troy's flat, to suggest that beauty can survive in this bleak, postwar landscape: "I can be ... like what they used to tell us in Sunday school," she writes Troy, "like one of them lilies in a field what Jesus used to talk about."
Throughout, Lawton underscores his tale with music. Meret and a string orchestra play at Auschwitz as Nazis send prisoners to the furnaces. In New Mexico, the boom from an exploding atomic bomb bounces "off the mountains in an endless repetitive echo ... as rhythmical as the beating of some red Indian drum." And in London, Meret and Viktor give a concert that leads Troy to the solution of the case.
Together, these notes, chords and rhythms transform "A Lily of the Field" into a haunting symphony in a minor key.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
|
| Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top |
|
|
 |
| Recent Stories |
 THE TWISTED SISTERHOOD: Unraveling the Dark Legacy of Female Friendships
FIVE BOOKS ON ZOMBIES
THREE BOOKS ABOUT DRACULA
HALF A LIFE
SIMON WIESENTHAL: The Life and Legends |
|
|
|
|
|
| |
