Monday, June 20, 2011

Drowning Ruth

by: Christina Schwarz
photo from: http://www.andycollin.com/2011/02/cyanotype/

"I drowned too.
That's stupid. If you drowned, you'd be dead.
Sometimes you die, sometimes you don't"


Drowning doesn't always mean death. There is literal drowning-- suffocating under water-- and there is figurative drowning--loosing control of emotions. 
This book is about drowning.
All of the above drowning.


What does it mean to lose control? What does it mean to lose a life? To lose a love? To lose sanity? To lose the ability to hold on? To lose a sister, daughter, wife, mother, friend?
This book is about loss.
All of the above loss.


All families have their secrets. Secrets untold between other members of the family, or secrets kept  only within the family. Family secrets kept hidden, secrets leaked out over time, and secrets itching at the surface.
This book is about family secrets.
All of the above family secrets. 


Written in the first person of Amanda, Ruth, and Mathilde, this book gives several different perspectives of the same stories. Jumping back and forth in time, and between first and third person, the reader is left to put the pieces together.

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Hershey

Hershey: Milton S. Hershey's Extraordinary Life of Wealth, Empire, and Utopian Dreams
By Michael D'Antonio


Milton S. Hershey spent most of his life failing. He quit school. He started working at the local candy shop (because his mom forced him to, and it was the only way to meet girls!). Milton quit that. He started making candy and failed. He started making caramels and after a small success- he failed. He moved out west with his caramel recipe and failed out there. Milton moved to Chicago and failed. He spent every day observing how the wold fair confectioners worked. After the fair came down he bought all of their equipment and shipped it back East. After he came back East, Milton failed again. Pretty soon, he sold all of his equipment. He started making chocolate with a small success. He bought new equipment, hired a team, built a factory and after the initial boom- there wasn't enough demand so Milton fired everyone and sold his equipment. Milton S. Hershey never gave up; he went bankrupt several times; his family stopped giving him loans; his family even stopped believing in him.

It wasn't until he heard that the Cadbury Family was mixing milk into their chocolates, that he tried that. He combined his caramel and candy making skills into a new milk chocolate product. Milton created something wonderful! It was so wonderful in fact that someone overseas wanted a couple hundred of these chocolate bars. After pleading with his family and the bank- no one would give him money. He happened to go to the bank again- for one last plea. It just so happened to be at a time when the manager wasn't there, the new bank teller approved the loan and gave Milton the money. (Later the bank teller got in trouble with his manager.) With this loan, Milton bought equipment, made the chocolate bars, sent them off and SUCCESS!

It all went uphill from here. Milton's business took off, he created a school for orphan boys, and created a small (which later turned into a very large) community to support his business. Throughout all of Milton's successes he was always willing to give back to the community. He even invested all of the business's stock into the school stock so that if the business went under, the school would remain steady. He made quite a name for himself and his chocolate business just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Even when the country was rationing sugar because of the war- the US Military gave Hershey a sugar stipend to continue making his chocolate for the soldiers. Chocolate not only boosted the soldiers' morale, but it reminded them of home. This turned the Hershey bar into a classic American icon. Same thing happened to the Coca-Cola company. After Coca-Cola was shipped overseas, they decided to create factories worldwide. Hershey remained tied to Pennsylvania and did not want to follow in Coca-Cola's footsteps in this way.

Hershey had ties or connections with a lot of other big names throughout this time period. His biggest rival was Wrigley. And thankfully, Hershey did not invest in the Wrigley Company, nor in baseball. He did buy smaller candy companies and there was an interesting disagreement on which candies E.T should eat in the movie (between M&M and Reese's). Reese's ended up winning and Hershey received the benefit. Hershey was constantly looking to the Cadbury Company to see what they do, what they added to their chocolate, and how their community ran.

Milton Hershey never gave up. He was 80 years old and still experimenting with chocolate, trying to find new products. He even tried to make chocolate healthier by combining vegetables- broccoli chocolate. Even after all of his failure throughout his life- he kept trying to perfect his business. He died a very humble billionaire. The last 100 pages deal with the politics surrounding his estate, Hershey Park, the school and the business after Milton's death. 
 
One of my favorite parts is that during the beginning of his success, Hershey was so overwhelmed because he was trying to do everything well. After he realized that he cannot do everything well, he downsized to do a few things perfectly. It was during this time that he perfected the little chocolate Hershey Kiss. The Kiss was something that everyone could afford and convenience stores could buy it by the thousands.

Thursday, June 2, 2011

Reading Lolita in Tehran

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
By: Azar Nafisi

Society defines you.

No matter how many times you have heard it. No matter whether you choose to believe it or not. Society defines you. There are laws that help keep peace; there are laws for protection; there are religious laws. There are different laws in different countries, different laws in different religions, and men and women have different laws in some places. The women in Tehran were jailed for flirting, or beaten for not wearing their veils. They were married without their consent, forced into relationships, and killed or tortured without reason.  They were stripped of all their humanity and left feeling emotionless, helpless, and alone. "Living in the Islam Republic is like having sex with a man you loathe" (329). In Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov beautifully illustrates horrific accounts of Lolita's suffering. As the reader, I am on the outside catching a small glimpse into Lolita's world, I was not living it-- unlike the women in Tehran.  Reading and discussing literature became Manna, Mashid, Nassrin, Yassi, Azin, Sanaz, and Mitra's safety against the war, murder, torture, and crime around them. They were comforted by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, Jane Austen, other great poets and authors, and yes- comforted by even Vladimir Nabokov.

These women related to these great pieces of literature, questioned the author's motives, and dreamed of far off places of West Egg, and longed for a relationship--with feelings and emotions--like Darcy and Elizabeth. They saw themselves as Lolita: alone and afraid, Daisy: longing for love, and Elizabeth: exploring what it means to be in a relationship. "A novel is not an allegory... It is the sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you wont be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience" (111). The experiences told through this book are not only those of Azar, Manna, Mashid, Nassrin, Yassi, Azin, Sanaz, and Mitra but also those experiences within Lolita, The Great Gatsby, The Ambassadors, Daisy Miller, Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, poets, authors, scholars, and the others in Tehran.

Azar Nafisi helps Manna, Mashid, Nassrin, Yassi, Azin, Sanaz, and Mitra through this troubled time in Tehran, by not only teaching them great literary classics, but re-establishes in them the human desire to think and feel for themselves. "Art is no longer snobbish or cowardly. It teaches peasants to use tractors, gives lyrics to young soldiers, designs textiles for factory women's dresses, writes burlesque for factory theaters, does a hundred other useful tasks. Art is useful as bread" (107).