Year of no sugar

Year of no sugar / Eve O. Schaub 303 pgs.

What if you decided not to eat sugar for a year?  Would it be easy?  I not talking about the motivation but the possibility.  Eve Schaub found out there is very little processed food that doesn't have added sugar. Seriously very little.  She and her family embark on this project with a couple of exceptions and they actually pull it off.  But there is so much more to it than being motivated and then finding the right foods.  If you pay attention, you realize how much love = sugar.  When we do something special for someone, it often includes baked goods.  Nobody gives you a carrot on your birthday...but carrot cake?  That is acceptable.  It is amazing how many "rewards" given to kids are sugar based.  So it takes much more than motivation and the ability to find foods without sugar, you have to break a lot of social agreements as well.  Eve and her family manage to do this even though at times it is very difficult.  I'm sure I could never manage without sweets but it does make me aware of how much sugar I eat without making the exception for dessert.  Now I too will be paying more attention to labels and shopping more carefully for the things that I don't want to pack a sugar punch.

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Unfamiliar Fishes / Sarah Vowell 238 pp.

The author of Assassination Vacation and The Wordy Shipmates brings us another gem, albeit one with a more mournful tone.  Vowell tells us the story of American contact with the kingdom of Hawaii to the time of our country's annexation of those islands during the McKinley administration, and it's a sad one.  In Vowell's characteristic style, though, momentous history is interspersed with personal, political, and sexual oddities of all kinds, which makes for one-of-a-kind listening (and reading).  There are plenty of villains; they are, alas, greatly outnumbered by the victims.