Obroni and the Chocolate Factory

Obroni and the Chocolate Factory
Author: Steven Wallace
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2017-11-21
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1510723668

What country makes the best chocolate? Most people would answer "Switzerland," or, if they're discerning, "Belgium" or "France." But, how many cocoa trees grow in Zurich? Lyon? Antwerp? Shouldn't the country known for growing the best cocoa beans be the one that makes the best chocolate? So, captivated by theories of international trade but with precious little knowledge of cocoa or chocolate, Steven Wallace set out to build the Omanhene Cocoa Bean Company in Ghana—a country renowned for its cocoa and where Wallace spent part of his youth—in a quest to produce the world's first export-ready, single-origin chocolate bar. What followed would be the true story of an obroni—white person—from Wisconsin taking on the ultimate entrepreneurial challenge. Written with sensitivity and devastating self-awareness, Obroni and the Chocolate Factory is Steven's chaotic, fascinating, and bemusing journey to create a successful international business that aspired to do a bit of good in the world. This book is at once a penetrating business memoir and a story about imagining globalism done right. Wallace's picaresque journey takes him to Ghana's residence for the head of state, to the Amsterdam offices of a secretive international cocoa conglomerate, and face-to-face with key figures in the sharp-elbowed world of global trade and geopolitics. Along the way he'll be forced to deal with bureaucratic roadblocks, a legacy of colonialism, corporate intrigue, inscrutable international politics, a Bond-esque villain nemesis, and constant uncertainty about whether he'll actually pull it off. This rollicking love letter to both Ghana and the world of business is a rare glimpse into the mind of an unusually literate and articulate entrepreneur.

Chocolate Nations

Chocolate Nations
Author: Órla Ryan
Publisher: Zed Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2012-04-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9781780323091

Chocolate - the very word conjures up a hint of the forbidden and a taste of the decadent. Yet the story behind the chocolate bar is rarely one of luxury. From the thousands of children who work on plantations to the smallholders who harvest the beans, Chocolate Nations reveals the hard economic realities of our favourite sweet. This vivid and gripping exploration of the reasons behind farmer poverty includes the human stories of the producers and traders at the heart of the West African industry. Orla Ryan shows that only a tiny fraction of the cash we pay for a chocolate bar actually makes it back to the farmers, and sheds light on what Fair Trade really means on the ground. Provocative and eye-opening, Chocolate Nations exposes the true story of how the treat we love makes it on to our supermarket shelves.

Storytelling for Sustainability in Higher Education

Storytelling for Sustainability in Higher Education
Author: Petra Molthan-Hill
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2020-03-25
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1000763218

To be a storyteller is an incredible position from which to influence hearts and minds, and each one of us has the capacity to utilise storytelling for a sustainable future. This book offers unique and powerful insights into how stories and storytelling can be utilised within higher education to support sustainability literacy. Stories can shape our perspective of the world around us and how we interact with it, and this is where storytelling becomes a useful tool for facilitating understanding of sustainability concepts which tend to be complex and multifaceted. The craft of storytelling is as old as time and has influenced human experience throughout the ages. The conscious use of storytelling in higher education is likewise not new, although less prevalent in certain academic disciplines; what this book offers is the opportunity to delve into the concept of storytelling as an educational tool regardless of and beyond the boundaries of subject area. Written by academics and storytellers, the book is based on the authors’ own experiences of using stories within teaching, from a story of “the Ecology of Law” to the exploration of sustainability in accounting and finance via contemporary cinema. Practical advice in each chapter ensures that ideas may be put into practice with ease. In addition to examples from the classroom, the book also explores wider uses of storytelling for communication and sense-making and ways of assessing student storytelling work. It also offers fascinating research insights, for example in addressing the question of whether positive utopian stories relating to climate change will have a stronger impact on changing the behaviour of readers than will dystopian stories. Everyone working as an educator should fi nd some inspiration here for their own practice; on using storytelling and stories to co-design positive futures together with our students.

Globalization and Socio-Cultural Processes in Contemporary Africa

Globalization and Socio-Cultural Processes in Contemporary Africa
Author: Eunice N. Sahle
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2016-04-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1137519142

In different but complementary ways, the chapters in this collection provide a deeper understanding of socio-cultural processes in various parts of the African continent. They do so in the context of contemporary mediated processes of globalization, and emphasize the agency of Africans.

Cocoa

Cocoa
Author: Kristy Leissle
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2018-02-12
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1509513205

Chocolate has long been a favorite indulgence. But behind every chocolate bar we unwrap, there is a world of power struggles and political maneuvering over its most important ingredient: cocoa. In this incisive book, Kristy Leissle reveals how cocoa, which brings pleasure and wealth to relatively few, depends upon an extensive global trade system that exploits the labor of five million growers, as well as countless other workers and vulnerable groups. The reality of this dramatic inequity, she explains, is often masked by the social, cultural, emotional, and economic values humans have placed upon cocoa from its earliest cultivation in Mesoamerica to the present day. Tracing the cocoa value chain from farms in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean, through to chocolate factories in Europe and North America, Leissle shows how cocoa has been used as a political tool to wield power over others. Cocoa's politicization is not, however, limitless: it happens within botanical parameters set by the crop itself, and the material reality of its transport, storage, and manufacture into chocolate. As calls for justice in the industry have grown louder, Leissle reveals the possibilities for and constraints upon realizing a truly sustainable and fulfilling livelihood for cocoa growers, and for keeping the world full of chocolate.

Too Famous

Too Famous
Author: Michael Wolff
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2021-10-19
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1250147638

If you can judge a book by its enemies, Too Famous could be an instant classic. Bestselling author of Fire and Fury and chronicler of the Trump White House Michael Wolff dissects more of the major monsters, media whores, and vainglorious figures of our time. His scalpel opens their lives, careers, and always equivocal endgames with the same vividness and wit he brought to his disemboweling of the former president. These brilliant and biting profiles form a mesmerizing portrait of the hubris, overreach, and nearly inevitable self-destruction of some of the most famous faces from the Clinton era through the Trump years. When the mighty fall, they do it with drama and with a dust cloud of gossip. This collection pulls from new and unpublished work—recent reporting about Tucker Carlson, Jared Kushner, Harvey Weinstein, Ronan Farrow, and Jeffrey Epstein—and twenty years of coverage of the most notable egomaniacs of the time—among them, Hillary Clinton, Michael Bloomberg, Andrew Cuomo, Rudy Giuliani, Arianna Huffington, Roger Ailes, Boris Johnson, and Rupert Murdoch—creating a lasting statement on the corrosive influence of fame. Ultimately, this is an examination of how the quest for fame, notoriety, and power became the driving force of culture and politics, the drug that alters all public personalities. And how their need, their desperation, and their ruthlessness became the toxic grease that keeps the world spinning. You know the people here by name and reputation, but it’s guaranteed that after this book you will never see them the same way again or fail to recognize the scorched earth the famous leave behind them.

Toward the Geopolitical Novel

Toward the Geopolitical Novel
Author: Caren Irr
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 359
Release: 2013-12-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0231536313

Caren Irr's survey of more than 125 novels outlines the dramatic resurgence of the American political novel in the twenty-first century. She explores the writings of Chris Abani, Susan Choi, Edwidge Danticat, Junot Díaz, Dave Eggers, Jeffrey Eugenides, Aleksandar Hemon, Hari Kunzru, Dinaw Mengestu, Norman Rush, Gary Shteyngart, and others as they rethink stories of migration, the Peace Corps, nationalism and neoliberalism, revolution, and the expatriate experience. Taken together, these innovations define a new literary form: the geopolitical novel. More cosmopolitan and socially critical than domestic realism, the geopolitical novel provides new ways of understanding crucial political concepts to meet the needs of a new century.

Hershey

Hershey
Author: Michael D'Antonio
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2007-01-09
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 074326410X

D'Antonio pens the first full biography of one of the most successful and unusual business titans of the 20th century--Milton Hershey--and a startling history of how his commanding fortune shaped a unique utopian legacy.

Seoul Man

Seoul Man
Author: Frank Ahrens
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2016-08-16
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0062405268

Recounting his three years in Korea, the highest-ranking non-Korean executive at Hyundai sheds light on a business culture very few Western journalists ever experience, in this revealing, moving, and hilarious memoir. When Frank Ahrens, a middle-aged bachelor and eighteen-year veteran at the Washington Post, fell in love with a diplomat, his life changed dramatically. Following his new bride to her first appointment in Seoul, South Korea, Frank traded the newsroom for a corporate suite, becoming director of global communications at Hyundai Motors. In a land whose population is 97 percent Korean, he was one of fewer than ten non-Koreans at a company headquarters of thousands of employees. For the next three years, Frank traveled to auto shows and press conferences around the world, pitching Hyundai to former colleagues while trying to navigate cultural differences at home and at work. While his appreciation for absurdity enabled him to laugh his way through many awkward encounters, his job began to take a toll on his marriage and family. Eventually he became a vice president—the highest-ranking non-Korean at Hyundai headquarters. Filled with unique insights and told in his engaging, humorous voice, Seoul Man sheds light on a culture few Westerners know, and is a delightfully funny and heartwarming adventure for anyone who has ever felt like a fish out of water—all of us.