Husband and wife Marc Aronson (Sir Walter Raleigh and the Quest for Eldorado) and Marina Budhos (Ask Me No Questions) here team up to tell an eye-opening, often disturbing history of sugar and its impact on people and cultures around the globe.
The authors begin with personal entry points, which can be tricky when writing nonfiction. However, they successfully set a tone for a sweeping history brought home for young readers through the moving stories of individuals. Both authors' family histories are tied to wealthy landowners who subjected laborers to extreme conditions and physical danger. The particulars of their two stories--one set in a Russia that still embraced serfdom, the other in a late 19th-century British Guiana that relied on indentured servitude--relate to the overarching themes of the sugar narrative writ large, and the movement from the Age of Honey to the Age of Sugar to the Age of Science.
No matter how farflung the plantations discussed were, the sugar refinement process remained the same for hundreds of years. Workers pushed the cane into mill wheels until the cane was completely crushed. The overseers kept an ax nearby so that if a worker's arm got sucked into the mill's grinders, someone could hack it off before the rest of his or her body followed. Another group of workers manned the boiling house where a worker could inadvertently wind up in a bubbling vat. Whether readers examine the striking series of mid–19th century paintings on sugarmaking by William Clark or photographs from 20th-century sugar plantations in the Caribbean, Louisiana or Brazil, they will be struck by how little the sugar refinement process varies, and how perilous it is no matter where the workers live.
Still, despite the horrible conditions, the laborers found solace in their music, such as the bomba in Puerto Rico, Maculelê in Brazil and jazz in Louisiana.
Aronson and Budhos recount tales of heroic individuals like Zumbi, who led Africans, Native Americans and white slaves to an area called Palmares in the mountains of Brazil (1600-1695); and, a century later, Toussaint, who led an uprising against the French in Saint Domingue (now Haiti). One of the most inspiring stories is that of Norbert Rillieux, fathered by a white planter and engineer, born into slavery in New Orleans in 1806 and sent to France to be educated; he invented a way to simplify the refinement of sugar, both in the number of steps and the number of people required--yet was denied credit for his idea.
Abolitionist heroes familiar (Abraham Lincoln) and unfamiliar (Pierre Lemerre the Younger, a Frenchman who said in 1716, decades before the American Declaration of Independence, "All men are equal") all play a part in this centuries-long struggle. And Mohandas Gandhi, often more associated with salt than sugar, formulated his ideas about satyagraha (which means "truth with force," or "love-force") when he met an abused indentured servant working the sugar mills of Natal, South Africa. From his defense of the rights of sugar workers, Gandhi solidified the ideas that would lead his native India to independence from Great Britain. Aronson and Budhos clearly convey the way in which individuals and singular events influenced the course of history--whether it be average citizens with a growing taste for sweets who contribute to the demand for sugar, a leader in a slave revolt, or an abolitionist's cry to boycott tea, "the blood-sweetened beverage." The authors demonstrate that we all have a personal connection to sugar, and that history is made by the choices individuals make. An impassioned, thought-provoking account that forces us to look anew at the things we take for granted.--Jennifer M. Brown