Word: krafts
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...these stomach-churning times, there's comfort to be had in chocolate. Just ask Kraft. The world's second-largest foodmaker revealed on Monday, Sept. 7, that it had launched a $16.7 billion bid for British confectioner Cadbury, a bold effort to create "a global powerhouse in snacks" worth $50 billion a year in revenues. Cadbury rejected the offer, but Kraft, maker of Oreo cookies and Kool-Aid, showed its sweet tooth. The firm is "committed to working toward a transaction," it said in a statement, "and to maintaining a constructive dialogue...
...Could those production snags trickle down to the price of a cuppa joe? The signs are that they are starting to. U.S. food company Kraft upped the price of its Maxwell House Colombian ground coffees by roughly a fifth in April. Rival Smucker's made a similar move earlier in the month for its brand, Folgers. Tea drinkers are being milked for more too. Responding to increased market prices, Anglo-Dutch conglomerate Unilever - owner of the PG tips and Scottish Blend brands - plans to increase the cost of its tea bags by about 10% in the coming weeks. Patrons...
This is the story of Eric Kraft's novel Flying (Picador; 581 pages). And of course, Peter's "full and frank disclosure" is much more a Proustian exercise in creative recollection than a marshaling of the facts. After all, Peter is an imaginative soul, and he knows it--that's what got him into this mess in the first place. "When you are a seat-of-the-pants memoirist," he writes, "you don't write about your life; you live your memoirs. You begin to feel that you and your account of yourself are one, like a mythical beast...
...most part, Flying is a reminder of how entertaining a novel can be when it slips the surly bonds of realism. Kraft's characters don't talk like people actually talk. They're more witty, more astute, and they express themselves with infinitely more pizazz. This is true even of Peter's winged steed, the charmingly anthropomorphized Spirit of Babbington, which may not be an ace at lifting off but proves a surprisingly excellent road buddy. The effect is like a happy-go-lucky Nabokov, with all the road-tripping wordplay and none of the incest...
Having his way with words is Kraft's project too. The source of the plans for Peter's aerocycle is a do-it-yourself magazine called Impractical Craftsman--an inspired title for the age of armchair American ingenuity and, not incidentally, a nifty description of a fiction writer. On paper, a novel about hope, nostalgia, love, disillusionment, pataphysics and the science of lift might seem like a hopelessly overdetermined bucket of bolts, an aerodynamic impossibility. But Kraft's affectionately satirical, buoyant language makes Flying soar...