The Kelloggs: The Battling Brothers of Battle Creek - Howard Markel Audiobook

Written by Howard Markel
Read by Davis Colacci
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: HighBridge
Release date: August 8, 2018
Duration: 16:22:18

John Harvey Kellogg was one of America’s most beloved physicians; a bestselling author, lecturer, and health-magazine publisher; founder of the Battle Creek Sanitarium; and patron saint of the pursuit of wellness.

His youngest brother, Will, was the founder of the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company, which revolutionized the mass production of food and what we eat for breakfast.

In The Kelloggs, Howard Markel tells the sweeping saga of these two extraordinary men, whose lifelong competition and enmity toward one another changed America’s notion of health and wellness from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, and who helped change the course of American medicine, nutrition, wellness, and diet. As Markel chronicles the Kelloggs’ fascinating, Magnificent Ambersons-like ascent into the pantheon of American industrialists, we see the vast changes in American social mores that took shape in diet, health, medicine, philanthropy, and food manufacturing during seven decades-changing the lives of millions and helping to shape our industrial age.

Kirkus
“A dual biography of the highly successful Kellogg brothers, who “fought, litigated, and plotted against one another with a passion more akin to grand opera than the kinship of brothers.” One brother invented Corn Flakes, and the other was the most famous doctor of his time. They hated each other. Readers who suspect their lives might provide entertainment will not be disappointed by this delightful biography by Markel. In 1876, physician John Harvey Kellogg (1853-1943) took charge of a small Battle Creek sanitarium that followed Seventh-Day Adventist principles of vegetarianism and abstinence from tobacco and alcohol. A charismatic promoter and author, he vastly expanded the sanitarium and became a world-famous media doctor. His advice represented a vast improvement over 19th-century practices …. No businessman, John hired his brother Will Keith Kellogg (1860-1951) to manage the enterprise, rewarding his efficiency with low pay and no respect. It was only in 1906 that 46-year-old Will escaped, launched the Kellogg Company, and made a fortune. John responded with more than a decade of lawsuits and a lifetime of sniping. …. The author effectively shows the brothers’ “remarkable success was mutually dependent if not outright synergistic.” A superb warts-and-all account of two men whose lives help illuminate the rise of health promotion and the modern food industry.