The Candy Monkey Raves

Things get sticky when one writer mixes candy and politics

In spring 2004 I published an extremely strange book called Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America, which I described to my publisher (and the publisher described to readers) as "half candy porn, half candy polemic." The book is a memoir of my own lifelong sweets fetish, as well as an account of my cross-country journey to various small, independent candy bar manufacturers.

It got reviewed in a lot of unexpected venues, none, to my mind, more so than the right-wing magazine the National Review. The Review review was a kind assessment most of the way. But then, perhaps inevitably, the reviewer expressed disapproval of my decision to include my political views in the book.

She was hardly alone.

Over the next couple of weeks a number of similar reader reviews popped up on Amazon.com:

"I have read this pablum [sic] and feel I am owed the four hours it took to read. Mr. Almond please send me a refund. . . . Your paranoia about the Republican party and politics in general were as distastful [sic] as an Almond Joy candy bar."

"The parts about candy are fun but I can't believe the author became political and stupidly at that. . . . A shame."

"I literally threw the book across the room (where it still sits at this moment) after his progressive tantrum on page 204."

It was a truly bizarre chain of events. I was pretty sure there was some relationship between The National Review and the Amazon .com reviews. Like, maybe a bunch of conservatives only read the first half of the National Review piece and raced out to get Candyfreak, only to discover that I was, in fact, a commie.

Either that or the vast right-wing conspiracy was a lot vaster than any of us realized. Whatever the case, I am happy to cop to the basic complaint of these readers, though I will not provide any refunds.

Candyfreak does include a few lefty diatribes. Here's the main one:

What an embarrassment it was. The Bush tax cut had sopped the rich and wiped out the federal surplus. The economy was in the crapper. Dubya was doing everything in his power to hand the planet to Exxon.