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Candyfreak: A Journey through the Chocolate…
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Candyfreak: A Journey through the Chocolate Underbelly of America

by Steve Almond

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991477,857 (3.8)40
2004 (5) adult (4) Alex Award (5) America (5) biography (6) business (9) candy (114) candy industry (13) childhood (4) chocolate (59) cultural studies (9) essays (9) food (128) food writing (18) history (17) humor (59) library (6) manufacturing (5) memoir (73) non-fiction (190) nostalgia (13) own (10) pop culture (22) read (15) signed (5) sociology (13) to-read (14) travel (13) unread (7) USA (7)
  1. 10
    Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal by Eric Schlosser (Alliebadger)
    Alliebadger: Both of these are similar in that they explore the seedy underbelly of their respective food industries: candy and fast food. They are both witty and informative (and they definitely make you want to eat something).
  2. 00
    The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars by Joël Glenn Brenner (caitlinlizzy)
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Showing 1-5 of 48 (next | show all)
YUMMY! ( )
  cougargirl1967 | Apr 20, 2013 |
LOVE THIS BOOK! Fun, fresh, crazy and indulgent. Very engaging, informative read. ( )
  Firecrackerscribe | Apr 2, 2013 |
An affectionate romp through candy nostalgia, not omitting biting commentary on the politics of big corporations vs. independent manufacturers
- Frequent forced humor

Not the easiest book to read on the treadmill, filled as it is with virtually pornographic paeans to a variety of candies. Motivated by his great love of candy, Almond tours several independent candy companies still hanging on in the U.S. If you like Americana or still bore your friends with tales of a local candy you enjoyed in your youth and have never seen again, you'll enjoy this book. Almond's love of candy is endearing and the book is both entertaining and informative.

Almond is at his worst when he strains to be funny rather than trusting that his observations are amusing on their own, or in juxtaposition with his rather pathos-saturated analyses of what sounds like a reasonably average American childhood. I’d rather read a book that simply includes exposition on the author’s various inadequacies and failures without also having to suffer his attempts at wittiness. The Prologue and Chapter 1 particularly suffer from what I can only describe as a failed attempt to emulate Woody Allen. Don't let this dissuade you from plowing onward to the rest of the book, which is considerably less self-conscious.

The most critical observation I have to make about Candyfreak is that Almond's nostalgia for the golden age of American candy is paired with his contempt for today's analogue of the family-owned candy company of yore: The small organic, gourmet, or specialty candy manufacturer. Though he uses a candy-sampling vocabulary that would do a wine snob proud, Almond presents himself as a proletarian kind of guy who wants nothing to do with the bourgeois piggery of new small candy concerns, and prefers instead to bemoan the crushing of the old candy companies by the Big Three large candy corporations. Yet confusingly he praises and appreciates Lake Champlain Chocolates. Other reviewers have criticized him for his self-disclosures and personal narrative in this book; I'd have liked to hear more, particularly about this seeming paradox, which I can only understand as a conflict between his image of himself and self-conscious image management versus how he actually behaves in the here-and-now. It reminds me of people who enjoy a local microbrew but want to complain about how much it costs; how stupid everyone is to drink it; and how when they were a teen "local beer" meant Ortlieb's, which by god cost $5 a case and wasn't any good, but still evokes one's callow youth. (Note: Not that I know anything about "Joe's beer.") I don't mean to suggest by this comment that Almond's book isn't fun to read, but that there's an inherent schism between what he wants and what he chooses to do. If candy is about the little guy, Almond should visit the little guys who have figured out the niche market for specialty candies; if it's about nostalgia, he should own this as his personal, Proust-like odyssey. The book would be better for it.

Note to Algonquin Books: It's really obvious when you spell agar agar both correctly and as "ager ager" several times in two pages. For a modest fee, I'll correct your proofs.

Note to the author: You consistently eat a great deal of candy, don't gain weight from this, and describe hypoglycemic reactions. Get your blood sugar checked now and then, Steve. I'm not a doctor but you sound like somebody at risk of developing adult-onset Type I diabetes. ( )
  OshoOsho | Mar 30, 2013 |
It's not going to change the world, but it's a fun book, entertainingly written, and made me crave a Snickers bar like never before in my life. ( )
  librarybrandy | Mar 29, 2013 |
What can I say--he included Bing Bars! I could almost forgive him making fun of twizzlers simply because of the fact that he included them.
It was a fun book--just wish that he hadn't decided to add some "adult" humor to evidently try to sell the book to a more mature audience. It wasn't needed and it really took away from the book since it showed just where his mind was half the time. ( )
  carolvanbrocklin | Feb 24, 2013 |
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Epigraph
See, only a chocolate Jesus will satisfy my soul. ~ Tom Waits
Dedication
To Don Ricci Almond, a freak of unparalleled wisdom and sweetness. I love you, Pop.
First words
SOME THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

I. The author has eaten a piece of candy every single day of his entire life.

(Prologue)
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Wikipedia in English (3)

Book description
This funny book documents a candy addict's journey to the few surviving small candy factories in the U.S. It makes you want to run out and get the candy he writes about...which is not easy to come by. He explains that stores (whether grocery or convienence) charge big bucks for the honor of having candy displayed....so small companies can't compete with the big candy companies like Hershey or Mars. Who knew?
Haiku summary

Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0156032937, Paperback)

Picture a magical, sugar-fueled road trip with Willy Wonka behind the wheel and David Sedaris riding shotgun, complete with chocolate-stained roadmaps and the colorful confetti of spent candy wrappers flying in your cocoa powder dust. If you can imagine such a manic journey--better yet, if you can imagine being a hungry hitchhiker who's swept through America's forgotten candy meccas: Philadelphia (Peanut Chews), Sioux City (Twin Bing), Nashville (Goo Goo Cluster), Boise (Idaho Spud) and beyond--then Candyfreak: A Journey through the Chocolate Underbelly of America, Steve Almond's impossible-to-put down portrait of regional candy makers and the author's own obsession with all-things sweet, would be your Fodor's guide to this gonzo tour.

With the aptly named Almond (don't even think of bringing up the Almond Joy bit--coconut is Almond's kryptonite), obsession is putting it mildly. Almond loves candy like no other man in America. To wit: the author has "three to seven pounds" of candy in his house at all times. And then there's the Kit Kat Darks incident; Almond has a case of the short-lived confection squirreled away in an undisclosed warehouse. "I had decided to write about candy because I assumed it would be fun and frivolous and distracting," confesses Almond. "It would allow me to reconnect to the single, untarnished pleasure of my childhood. But, of course, there are no untarnished pleasures. That is only something the admen of our time would like us to believe." Almond's bittersweet nostalgia is balanced by a fiercely independent spirit--the same underdog quality on display by the small candy makers whose entire existence (and livelihood) is forever shadowed by the Big Three: Hershey's, Mars, and Nestle.

Almond possesses an original, heartfelt, passionate voice; a writer brave enough to express sheer joy. Early on his tour he becomes entranced with that candy factory staple, the "enrober"--imagine an industrial-size version of the glaze waterfall on the production line at your local Krispy Kreme, but oozing chocolate--dubbing it "the money shot of candy production." And while he writes about candy with the sensibilities of a serious food critic (complimenting his beloved Kit Kat Dark for its "dignified sheen," "puddinglike creaminess," "coffee overtones," and "slightly cloying wafer") words like "nutmeats" and "rack fees" send him into an adolescent twitter.

...the Marathon Bar, which stormed the racks in 1974, enjoyed a meteoric rise, died young, and left a beautiful corpse. The Marathon: a rope of caramel covered in chocolate, not even a solid piece that is, half air holes, an obvious rip-off to anyone who has mastered the basic Piagetian stages, but we couldn't resist the gimmick. And then, as if we weren't bamboozled enough, there was the sleek red package, which included a ruler on the back and thereby affirmed the First Rule of Male Adolescence: If you give a teenage boy a candy bar with a ruler on the back of the package, he will measure his dick

Candyfreak is one of those endearing, quirky titles that defy swift categorization. One of those rare books that you'll want to tear right through, one you won't soon stop talking about. And eager readers beware: It's impossible to flip through ten pages of this sweet little book without reaching for a piece of chocolate. --Brad Thomas Parsons

(retrieved from Amazon Thu, 14 Feb 2013 13:46:26 -0500)

(see all 3 descriptions)

A self-proclaimed candy fanatic and life-long chocoholic trace the history of some of the much-loved candies from his youth, describing the business practices and creative candy-making techniques of some of the small companies. A self-professed candy freak, Steve Almond set out in search of a much-loved candy from his childhood and found himself on a tour of the small candy companies that are persevering in a marketplace where big corporations dominate. From the Twin Bing to the Idaho Spud, the Valomilk to the Abba-Zaba, and discontinued bars such as the Caravelle, Marathon, and Choco-Lite, Almond uncovers a trove of singular candy bars made by unsung heroes working in old-fashioned factories to produce something they love. And in true candy freak fashion, Almond lusciously describes the rich tastes that he has loved since childhood and continues to crave today. Steve Almond has written a comic but ultimately bittersweet story of how he grew up on candy, and how, for better and worse, the candy industry has grown up, too. Candy freak is the delicious story of one man's lifelong obsession with candy and his quest to discover its origins in America. Almond embarks on a hilarious, sugar-high tour through America's last remaining independent candy companies.… (more)

» see all 2 descriptions

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