J. Robert Lennon writes:

Rich Cohen’s grandfather, Ben Eisenstadt, founded Cumberland Packing, the developers of both Sweet’N Low and the sugar packet itself. So you might expect the results of his sugar substitute taste test to err on the side of loyalty. Nope. ‘Tastes like cancer,’ he writes. ‘The aftertaste drags you to the mat.’ And then, after he gives Splenda a try: ‘Cumberland is going to get crushed.’ This exuberant bluntness is typical of the best bits of his book. His lack of loyalty isn’t ingratitude: his mother was disinherited from the family fortune. The reasons for this disinheritance, and for the downfall – still ongoing – of Cumberland Packing are the book’s subjects; and they make for a vivid demonstration of the ways the personal and the political interact, often disastrously, with the economic.

(LRB 8 March 2007)

Cape | paperback 272 pp. |ISBN: 9780224072724