"Chicken Soup" doesn't agree with everybody

The people at "Chicken Soup for the you-fill-in-the-blank Soul" own the chickensoup domain. What an empire has grown over a ten-year period. The October 6 issue of The New Yorker magazine has a great article by Cynthia Gorney called "Chicken Soup Nation." One of the many astonishing aspects of this outfit is that big chunks of it run on material that people submit that, if accepted, makes publication its own reward. For some reason, these Chicken Soup books are thought to be appropriate presents for the elderly. All oldest-generation people in this family are in their nineties or older and they uniformly loathe these books and throw them away at once. If taxpaper money is buying any of these items for the library, then they merit at least a look, since it's for free and this is such a phenomenon.