Sweet and Low A Family Story [Paperback]

Sweet and Lowis 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 Lowis 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.

Discussion Questions

1. At the beginning ofSweet and Low, Rich Cohen says, To be disinherited is to be set free. What sort of freedom does he have in mind? Is there such a thing as negative freedom? How does this relate to the line in the Janis Joplin song, Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose. And: Do you believe him?

2. Why does the author call this a Brooklyn story? How do the lives of these people connect to or amplifythe history of the borough?

3. He describes his family as expatriateswhat does he mean by this? IsSweet and Lowan outsider's story? How did growing up in the Midwest, away from the main players, determine the story he tells?

4. Is this l“*