Tim Richardson (1)

If I retain even half the information in this book, I'd be surprised. He spends a long time on the history of the sugar trade and the early uses of it, which gets a little dry and repetitive, but then it picks up again once he starts getting into the chronology of candy.

Biggest quibbles: how impressed the author was with himself (how many times did he refer to himself as an "international confectionery historian"?), and the lack of serial commas. I understand that this book was published in show more England, where their laws of punctuation are apparently more lax than here, but his lack of serial commas led to a number of sentences of the "I'd like to thank my parents, Ayn Rand and God" type (not to mention lists that were strung together as "X, y and z and a and b").

It hardly seems fair to downgrade his rating based on a style point on which his country and I disagree, but it's my rating and I can. Though his "I'm so important; I'm the only international confectionery historian in all the world" irked me, too. But his information was good. 3.5 stars, if I could. show less

500 pages, 1 photo and 1 garden designer per page. Gardeners range over all human history from such notables as Wordsworth, Sackville-West, Capability Brown, Olmsted, and God (who gets a shoutout for his influential but, alas, shortlived Eden project) to humbler devotees of horticulture such as Jose Maria Azuel Franco Guerrero, the Ecuadorian topiary master. This book has given me inspiration to tackle my own bland backyard.

Quite interesting. This was a remarkably detailed account of the actual history of candy and how it came to be - not about candy companies like I was expecting. Very well researched though it got bogged down at times with detail.

A book of commonplace pictures and very cmall font commentary. Interesting, but difficult to use.