Nonfiction

Sugar: The World Corrupted: From Slavery to Obesity

Filed Under: Books Read

Sugar: The World Corrupted: From Slavery to Obesity

Sugar: The World Corrupted: From Slavery to Obesity by James Walvin
Published by Pegasus Books on April 3, 2018
Pages: 352
Format: hardback
Genres: European World History, Health, Medicine
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Synopsis

How did a simple commodity, once the prized monopoly of kings and princes, become an essential ingredient in the lives of millions, before mutating yet again into the cause of a global health epidemic?

Prior to 1600, sugar was a costly luxury, the domain of the rich. But with the rise of the sugar colonies in the New World over the following century, sugar became cheap, ubiquitous and an everyday necessity. Less than fifty years ago, few people suggested that sugar posed a global health problem.  And yet today, sugar is regularly denounced as a dangerous addiction, on a par with tobacco. While sugar consumption remains higher than ever—in some countries as high as 100lbs per head per year—some advertisements even proudly proclaim that their product contains no sugar.

How did sugar grow from prize to pariah? Acclaimed historian James Walvin looks at the history of our collective sweet tooth, beginning with the sugar grown by enslaved people who had been uprooted and shipped vast distances to undertake the grueling labor on plantations.  The combination of sugar and slavery would transform the tastes of the Western world.

Masterfully insightful and probing, James Walvin reveals the relationship between society and sweetness over the past two centuries—and how it explains our conflicted relationship with sugar today.  

The Best American Crime Reporting 2008

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The Best American Crime Reporting 2008

The Best American Crime Reporting 2008 by Jonathan Kellerman, Thomas H. Cook, Otto Penzler
Published by HarperCollins e-books on October 6, 2009
Pages: 352
Format: ebook
Genres: Nonfiction, True Crime
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Synopsis

Thieves, liars, killers, and conspirators—it's a criminal world out there, and someone has got to write about it. An eclectic collection of the year's best reportage, The Best American Crime Reporting 2008 brings together the murderers and the master­minds, the mysteries and missteps that make for brilliant stories, told by the aces of the true-crime genre. This latest addition to the highly acclaimed series features guest editor Jonathan Kellerman, bestselling author of more than twenty crime novels, most recently Compulsion and the forthcoming Bones.

The Trauma Cleaner: One Woman’s Extraordinary Life in the Business of Death, Decay, and Disaster

Filed Under: Books Read

The Trauma Cleaner: One Woman’s Extraordinary Life in the Business of Death, Decay, and Disaster

The Trauma Cleaner: One Woman's Extraordinary Life in the Business of Death, Decay, and Disaster by Sarah Krasnostein
Published by St. Martin's Press on April 10, 2018
Pages: 288
Format: ebook
Genres: Biography
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Synopsis

Winner of the Victorian Prize for Literature, Sarah Krasnostein’s The Trauma Cleaner:
One Woman’s Extraordinary Life in the Business of Death, Decay, and Disaster
 is the fascinating biography of one of the people responsible for tidying up homes in the wake of natural—and unnatural—catastrophes and fatalities.

Homicides and suicides, fires and floods, hoarders and addicts. When properties are damaged or neglected, it falls to Sandra Pankhurst, founder of Specialized Trauma Cleaning (STC) Services Pty. Ltd. to sift through the ashes or sweep up the mess of a person’s life or death. Her clients include law enforcement, real estate agents, executors of deceased estates, and charitable organizations representing victimized, mentally ill, elderly, and physically disabled people. In houses and buildings that have fallen into disrepair, Sandra airs out residents’ smells, throws out their weird porn, their photos, their letters, the last traces of their DNA entombed in soaps and toothbrushes.

The remnants and mementoes of these people’s lives resonate with Sandra. Before she began professionally cleaning up their traumas, she experienced her own. First, as a little boy, raised in violence and excluded from the family home. Then as a husband and father, drag queen, gender reassignment patient, sex worker, small businesswoman, and trophy wife. In each role she played, all Sandra wanted to do was belong.

The Trauma Cleaner is the extraordinary true story of an extraordinary person dedicated to making order out of chaos with compassion, revealing the common ground Sandra Pankhurst—and everyone—shares with those struck by tragedy.