Thin Mint Memories: Scouting for Empowerment through the Girl Scout Cookie Program - Softcover

Carey, Shelley Johnson

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0998148008 ISBN 13: 9780998148007

Publisher: Clear Message Media, 2016

Synopsis

Thin Mint Memories: Scouting for Empowerment through the Girl Scout Cookie Program celebrates an American treasure by examining the first century of the cookie’s history and explores how participating in the Girl Scout cookie program leads to girl empowerment. This humorous and poignant story follows a Maryland troop through their cookie sales season and uses interviews with key Girl Scout staff to reveal the cookie program’s impact on the troop, council, and national levels. In Thin Mint Memories, Scouts past and present and their faithful customers will discover the roles each box of cookies plays in helping girls develop life skills that will serve them long after the last cookie crumb is eaten.

About this title

About the Author:

Inspired by her own Girl Scout experiences, Shelley Johnson Carey enjoys exploring themes of girl empowerment in her writing. Shelley lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, with her husband and fewer than five miles away from all three of her children. She works in educational publishing and received her BA from Hampshire College and her MFA in creative nonfiction from Goucher College. While the crunch of a Thin Mint evokes too many wonderful Girl Scout experiences to count, her absolute favorite cookie memories center around tasting the first coconutty Samoa of the cookie season.

Review:

In Thin Mint Memories, Shelley Johnson Carey takes readers into the world of Girl Scouts a rich, vivid world that empowers, educates, and supports girls and women. While most people envision cookie sales and campouts, Carey shows us a multifaceted business and a brand protected and nurtured from New Orleans to New York, from Silver Spring to Savannah. Carey starts at the beginning, with the story of Daisy Low, a divorcée and entrepreneur who launched a guides group for girls that broke barriers (and continues to do so today). Along the way, girls stumbled into the cookie business by way of their own ovens and ingenuity, and the Girl Scout cookie was born. With a deft hand, Carey weaves a tale of yesterday and today, of corporate and kids, of cookies and memories. She shows us what being a Girl Scout means, what the cookies mean, and how they create a means to an end. Girl Scout cookie lovers, some of whom are themselves Girl Scouts (because once a Scout, always a Scout), share their own memories of scouting and cookies, making this book not only large in scope but also surprisingly intimate. The book is well-written, crisp and clean as the Thin Mints Carey pays tribute to in the title. Each chapter captures a different facet of the industry, the cookie business (indeed, it is a business) and its benefits and what it means to a particular troop. I knew troops received only a small fraction of the cookie sale money, but I didn t know how else the money was used. This book tells the whole story. --Chris Fow Cohen

Thin Mint Memories tells the story of Girl Scout Cookies at many different levels. The history, going back to the beginnings of scouting, the early days of cookie baking and fundraising, all the way to today, the big business that cookie sales has become. We learn about logistics behind the sales, the need for PR spin at times (the great peanut butter recall!), and we get many different perspectives: from the national down to the troop. So many tasty details here: controversies over the different cookie names and preferences people have for different bakers. It s all here and so fascinating! And interspersed throughout the text are those Thin Mint Memories... personal stories about what Girl Scout cookies meant to the girls who sold them. And that s really the heart of Thin Mint Memories... the impact of the sales on girls. --Katie Rapp

About this edition

• Publisher: Clear Message Media
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0998148008
• ISBN 13: 9780998148007
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192