Out now in paperback
THE CASE AGAINST SUGAR by Gary Taubes
(Portobello Books €12.99) IF YOU have made some stern New Year resolutions about diet ,Gary Taubes’s persuasively argued polemic against sugar will stiffen your resolve.
‘A third of all adults are obese, two-thirds are overweight, almost one in seven is diabetic and one in four to five will die of cancer,’ he writes. ‘Yet the prime suspects for the dietary trigger of these conditions have been, until the last decade, treated as little worse than a source of harmless pleasure.’
Taubes argues that effective lobbying by sugar producers has succeeded in focusing blame for the current epidemic of diet-related ill-health on fat. This ignores the unique biochemical effects of sucrose and fructose, which render them as addictive and damaging to health as tobacco.
Read it, and step away from the cupcakes.
McMAFIA by Misha Glenny (Vintage €11.99)
McMAFIA, the BBC1 drama which began on New Year’s Day, stars James Norton as Alex Godman, the British-raised son of Russian exiles who struggles to escape his family’s Mafia links.
The series is based on Misha Glenny’s account of the Mafia’s global reach. ‘The book is non-fiction, the TV series is fiction; but the two are intimately linked,’ Glenny writes.
McMafia, the book, begins with the murder of Karen Reed, a 33year-old geophysicist who was shot in the head on her doorstep in Woking in April 1994.
Reed’s killing was a mistake: the assassin’s intended target was her sister, Alison Ponting, a BBC World Service producer married to Armenian Gacic Ter-Oganisyan. She met him while studying Russian at university. From that tragedy, Glenny traces a dramatic and horrifying worldwide chronicle of organised crime, violence, drugs and modern slavery.
TAKE COURAGE by Samantha Ellis (Vintage €23.80)
THE novelist George Moore described Anne Bronte as ‘a literary Cinderella’.
Anne was the youngest and least famous of the three Bronte sisters, and in this account of her life Samantha Ellis determines to rescue the writer from undeserved obscurity.
‘She wasn’t hungry for fame like Charlotte, who carefully managed her public image. She wasn’t unconventional like Emily, who tramped the moors in odd clothes.’ When she was 20, Anne wrote on the flyleaf of her Bible, ‘What, Where and How Shall I Be When I Have Got Through?’
In this idiosyncratic book — half biography, half memoir — Ellis explores that question not just on Anne’s behalf, but also her own, as she takes stock of her life at 40. Comparing the trajectories of their lives, she ends a long list of opportunities she has enjoyed and which Anne never had.