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Sweet and Low: A Family Story
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Sales rank 543,421
Customers rating (based on 77 reviews)
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Sweet and Low is the amazing, bittersweet, hilarious story of an American family and its patriarch, a short-order cook named Ben Eisenstadt who, in the years after World War II, invented the sugar packet and Sweet'N Low, converting his Brooklyn cafeteria into a factory and amassing the great fortune that would destroy his family. It is also the story of immigrants to the New World, sugar, saccharine, obesity, and the health and diet craze, played out across countries and generations but also within the life of a single family, as the fortune and the factory passed from generation to generation. The author, Rich Cohen, a grandson (disinherited, and thus set free, along with his mother and siblings), has sought the truth of this rancorous, colorful history, mining thousands of pages of court documents accumulated in the long and sometimes corrupt life of the factor, and conducting interviews with members of his extended family. Along the way, the forty-year family battle over the fortune moves into its titanic phase, with the money and legacy up for grabs. Sweet and Low is the story of this struggle, a strange comic farce of machinations and double dealings, and of an extraordinary family and its fight for the American dream. Rich Cohen is the author of Tough Jews, The Avengers, and Machers and Rockers, and the memoir Lake Effect. His work has appeared in The New Yorker and Vanity Fair, among many other publications, and he is a contributing editor to Rolling Stone. He lives in New York City. A New York Times Notable Book of the YearA Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year Sweet and Low is the story of an American family and its patriarch, a short-order cook named Ben Eisenstadt who, in the years after World War II, invented the sugar packet and Sweet'N Low, converting his Brooklyn cafeteria into a factory and amassing the great fortune that would destroy his family. It is also the story of immigrants to the New World, sugar, saccharine, obesity, and the health and diet craze, played out across countries and generations but also within the life of a single family, as the fortune and the factory passed from generation to generation. The author, Rich Cohen, a grandson (disinherited, and thus set free, along with his mother and siblings), has sought the truth of this rancorous, colorful history, mining thousands of pages of court documents accumulated in the long and sometimes corrupt life of the factor, and conducting interviews with members of his extended family. Along the way, the forty-year family battle over the fortune moves into its titanic phase, with the money and legacy up for grabs. Sweet and Low is the story of this struggle, a strange comic farce of machinations and double dealings, and of an extraordinary family and its fight for the American dream."A rollicking, utterly compelling family saga that is part detective story, part morality tale, part tragedy and part farce. It is a story peopled with eccentrics and naïfs and scoundrels, and a story recounted with uncommon acuity and wit . . . Mr. Cohen . . . writes about his family with a mixture of affection, outrage and bafflement, startled and often in awe at the strangeness of his relatives and the bizarre trajectory of their lives . . . He has not settled for writing a simple, straight-ahead memoir, however. Instead, he's intercut the story with tart and highly entertaining asides about everything from the history of Brooklyn to the history of the sugar business, from the legacy of the immigrant experience to the big business of diets and weight loss . . . [Cohen has] managed to turn his family's rancorous history into a gripping memoir: a small classic of familial triumph, travail and strife, and a telling—and often hilarious—parable about the pursuit and costs of the American Dream."—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "Do not disinherit a man who makes his living with a pen. He may exact revenge by splashing the family's boils and foibles in black-and white on the pages of a spectacularly entertaining book. That is the misfortune of the family of the late Benjamin Eisenstadt, self-made scion behind those ubiquitous pink packages of fake sugar piled in bowls on restaurant tabletops the world over. But it's a riotous reading experience for the rest of us, who get to enjoy Rich Cohen's roiling, boisterous, hysterical and weirdly scholarly remembrance of his messy, badly behaved Jewish clan in Sweet and Low."—Michael Ollove, The Baltimore Sun  "How decadent . . . to indulge in Rich Cohen's rollicking acount of his family and the business it built, a book that aims mostly to settle old scores, air dirty laundry and answer decades of petty insults from relatives . . . He paints vividly, and not flatteringly . . . [Cohen] has a terrific eye for detail, the little things that affix people and places in our memories, the gestures and miscues that shape family history . . . Reading him savage his family, you sometimes wonder, is he allowed to do this? It's a guilty pleasure—sort of like sugar without the calories."—Kate Zernike, The New York Times Book Review "A wildly addictive, high-octane narrative. Cohen sashays with boisterous panache from the history of the sugar trade to grandmother Betty's brooch . . . Cohen moves from journalistic objectivity to the intensely personal with ease, enjoying the kind of access that historians almost never get . . . Is Rich Cohen, the grandson who got squat from the Sweet'N Low millions, taking revenge? No; this book is about his mother, and the way that her family—the whole saccharine-sticky lot of them—were truly and unnaturally awful to her, a woman who makes but brief appearances in the narrative and is never eulogized. A woman who could have survived her vile relatives only through a tremendous inner strength. It is this strength which, subtly, gloriously, Rich Cohen celebrates."—John Barlowe, Washington Post "The rollicking saga of Grandpa Ben's business, 'taken over and stripmined by hooligans.' The battle overt his vast family fortune leads to feuds between siblings, corruption, lawsuits and the ultimate disintegration of the clan. It is Cohen's good fortune to be on the side of the family that was disinherited. Sweet revenge is the energy behind this glorious book."—Andrea Sachs, Time "Alternately delicious and sour . . . All these characters are portrayed with elegantly phrased detail, along with Cohen's insightful eye for the larger picture. Sweet and Low might as well be a Balzacian 19th-century novel complete with a crisis, a contested will and a tragic resolution . . . Sweet and Low is never less than fascinating reading, both for what it says and what it doesn't. Hell hath no fury like a writer deprived."—Melvin Bukiet, Los Angeles Times Book Review "Sweet and Low is a wondrous evocation of an era and character types that won't be seen again."—Ron Grossman, Chicago Tribune "The book is not just about settling scores . . . Mr. Cohen aims higher, writing not only about his family but also about the first Jewish settlers in N
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| Publisher | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | | Release date | 04/2006 | | Availability | | | Edition | Hardcover |
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 This book is Sweeet !!
I'm really glad that I took the chance to read this book. I enjoyed it so much. A book about a "sweetner"...who would have thought that it would be so interesting...but it is !!
One of the most fun I have read!
I love all of Rich Cohen's books, but this one is awesome! It is not only facinating, but hilarious! If your family had a family business-perhaps one that is slightly disfunctional-you will love this book.
Thorougly enjoyable read!
Sweet and Low is a fascinating blend of history, business and family dynamics.
Richard Cohen has an excellent story telling ability and sense of humor.
Unfortunately the greed and deceit seen in his extended family do not surprise me. Mr. Cohen is surprisingly able to tell the story without a whole lot of bitterness which gives it added appeal.
A dysfunctional family business
It's a testament to Cohen's writing and perhaps my own quirkiness that I found the history of artificial sweeteners so fascinating, but of course the real story here is the wackiness of this family and the business that they run. I loved the scene early in the book when the author's older brother learned at an early age that the dice (or in this case the little scraps of paper) were stacked against him, and he was not the favorite grandchild.
Both a personal memoir and the story of a hugely successful American business, Sweet and Low, combines a few different genres, and ends up being a page-turning read with plenty of humor throughout.
 Wiseguys don't make good writers
Rich Cohen tells his family's classic immigrant success story ... and how the family eventually became torn apart. He deserves tremendous credit for trying to bring balance to events that have brought heartache and shame to his family, and for separating fact from fiction. However, Cohen's writing style is hard to follow, and he presents the events in a strange arrangement, so the book is frustrating to read.
First, the basics. Two young Jews emigrate to New York's Lower East side in the early 1900s. They meet and marry, but they die young and leave an orphaned son, Ben Eisenstadt. As with so many other first-generation Americans, Ben pulls himself up through hard work, intelligence, and savvy.
Ben goes to law school and finishes near the top of his class. But it's 1929, and he can't find clients during the Depression. Ben helps out at the diner owned by his father-in-law, and eventually he takes it over and makes it a big success. Then, when the diner business slows, he transforms the property into a tea-packing operation. But that business is not doing well, and his wife suggests packing sugar in bags, similar to tea. Eisenstadt re-engineers a tea bag packer for sugar, and he presents the idea to Brooklyn's sugar refiners; they steal the idea from him (he didn't patent it). Rather than fuming, he and his son Marvin set out a few years later to invent a good-tasting sugar substitute -- and Sweet-and-Low is born. For the next two decades they prosper, and then it comes crashing down -- complete with federal indictments and family members written out of wills.
The story is told by one of the grandsons of Ben Eisenstadt: Rich Cohen, a magazine journalist. Cohen's mother was one of four children of Ben, and the only one who left the New York area (moving to Chicago with her husband). That led to an estrangement that permeated Cohen's life and was the impetus for the book.
While acknowledging his anger at his parents' treatment by the Eisenstadts, Cohen seeks to find out the truth about the family. How did it rise to success, and why did it crumble? Which of the familiy's extraordinary stories are true, and which are exaggerations, lies, or rationalizations about the past. His grandmother hiding guns for the Jewish mafia? Probably. His grandfather at the diner's lunch counter andn overhearing a conversation between a police detective and an accused embezzler, whereby he offers his services as a lawyer to the embezzler? True, and written about by the New York Times. Marvin, the second generation leader of the Sweet-and-Low operation, claiming ignorance that a mafia-connected guy on his payroll was stealing from the cmopany? Not plausible. Another daughter, Gladys, unwilling to leave the house for 30 years, but controlling the family by phone? That's what seems to have happened.
Amazing stories, and Cohen does a great job of teasing out the facts through voluminous research. However, the book falters when Cohen toggles back-and-forth between the family tales and points he wants to make about business and society. These trends include the tie between sugar and slavery, the tie between sugar and obesity, and the decline of American manufacturing and of Brooklyn after the 1950s. These sections are too short to be comprehensive, or even substantially accurate. They are weird impositions in a family epic. Also, Cohen's tone shift is distracting. Sometimes, he's a Brooklyn wiseguy (though he grew up near Chicago), and sometimes he's an aggrieved and confused grandson, and sometimes he's a poet about industrial decline. He's not very good at any of those styles, though he'd probably be best at sticking to the Wiseguy style that is his stock-in-trade in magazines.
Bottom line. It's an interesting tale for the right kind of reader. As a person with some interest in New York and immigrants in the 20th century, I found a lot to like in the book.
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