Kirsti's Reviews > Sweet and Low: A Family Story

Memoir of estrangement from a dysfunctional family + history of sugar and sugar substitutes + history of New York corruption = surprisingly compelling read. I actually laughed out loud a couple of times.

"There was an ancient form of primogeniture at play in the family; as the son of the oldest son, Cousin Jeffrey was golden. One week, Grandma Betty decided that a grandchild would, for no particular reason, have a party thrown in his or her honor, complete with cake and gifts. While standing in my aunt's room, Betty wrote the names on a slip of paper and dropped the slips in a hat. A winner was drawn: Jeffrey. Since Jeffrey seemed to win many such contests, my brother grew suspicious. When he picked up the hat, Betty said, 'Don't look!' Unfolding the slips, he had the great shock of his early life. Every ballot was marked 'Jeffrey.'"

About Grandma Esther, from the non-disinheriting side of the family: "She took an afternoon to tell a story that could be told in five minutes, then wound it up by saying, 'That's it in a nutshell.' . . . I once heard her ask a woman in her condo complex, 'Why do you hate me, fatso?' I once heard her say to a Holocaust survivor, 'You are one that Hitler should not have let get away.' When she took me and my sister to see Yentl, she asked for three tickets, one senior, two children. My sister was thirty, I was twenty-two. The three of us saw Yentl for four dollars."

"'It wasn't enough for them to leave her nothing,' my sister explained. 'They also wanted her to say that it was okay that they had left her nothing.'"

"We are what we eat, and we don't know what that is."

"To be disinherited is to be set free."

I did not realize that we have canned food and condensed milk because Gail Borden was so horrified to read accounts of the cannibalistic Donner Party.

One thing the author does not make clear is why, if his grandfather was such a clever lawyer, he did not apply for a patent for the sugar-packet machine.

The author is the son of the Herb Cohen, author of the excellent nonfiction book "Negotiate This!" I wonder if he would agree that some things are not negotiable.