Two Washington, D.C., siblings, disillusioned with life and love, join forces to realize a sweetly successful venture.
In the early 1980s, a time the Park sisters recognized as one of “luxury and excess,” Frances (“Francie”) and Ginger (“Ginge”) opened their dream boutique sweetshop mere blocks from the White House. Though life became bittersweet since their beloved father passed away a few years prior, both women write of a steely resolve, a dedication to family and a passion for chocolate they’d inherited from their hardworking Korean parents. Becoming chocoholics “long before it was a diagnosis,” the sisters parlayed this lifelong adoration into a joint business plan, agreed on a name (based on a delectable double-chocolate brownie recipe) and set forth making “Chocolate Chocolate” thrive in the nation’s capital. But the road to profitability proved arduous as mouthwatering taste-tests failed to buffer a series of dilemmas including tedious location scouting, a contractor’s shoddy workmanship, bomb threats, a near-disastrous grand-opening party and months of flagging sales. With patience and diligence, Francie, Ginge and their doting mother eventually began to develop a steady, eccentric clientele of chocolate lovers. Sales flourished, bolstered by whimsical holidays and a flood of media attention, and the girls even managed a few dating adventures. Despite the experience of a string of Korean-inspired children’s books (The Have a Good Day Café, 2005, etc.) and a novel between them, their memoir develops a surprisingly rambling quality and boasts a generic narrative voice lacking the intimacy of a first-person perspective. Still, the Park sisters’ cheery adage remains the definitive take-away: “There are times when only chocolate can make a bad day better.” Smooth, soft-centered confection that goes down with a smile.
Pub Date: May 10, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-65293-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2011
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
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