INTERESTING READS

The food industry’s fight for “stomach share” — the amount of digestive space that any one company’s brand can grab from the competition. “As a culture, we’ve become upset by the tobacco companies advertising to children, but we sit idly by while the food companies do the very same thing. And we could make a claim that the toll taken on the public health by a poor diet rivals that taken by tobacco”, Kelly Brownell, Professor of Pscyhology and Public Health, Yale University.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary-science-of-junk-food.html?pagewanted=all

UNWomen and UNICEF have initiated a global online discussion on inequalities. The current discussion is on gender inequality and future topics include violence against women, disability, indigenous peoples, etc.

http://www.worldwewant2015.org/inequalities?utm_source=iContact&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Inequalities:%20WorldWeWant2015&utm_content=

Via Saraswathi Menon of UNWomen

Harriet Gilbert’s World Book Club interviews can be heard on BBCi Player. This month’s interview has Swedish noir writer Henning Mankell speaking about Wallander and his first appearance in Faceless Killers. Next week Norways’s Jo Nesbo speaks about his unusual family – a father who fought with the Nazis and a mother in the Resistance – and how they influenced The Redbreast, a Harry Hole mystery. Down the list of WBC interviews are Russia’s Boris Akunin on his Putin-like Erast Fandorin, and Spain’s Carlos Ruiz Zafon on ‘ecclesiastical’ thrillers.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p003jhsk/episodes/player

Andea Camilleri’s The Potter’s Field (an Inspector Montalban mystery) is the winner of the Crime Writer Association’s International Dagger. The short list has mysteries set in Sweden, Norway, Italy and South Africa. The new talent is Maurizio de Giovanni with an intriguing sounding story set in fascist Italy.

http://thecwa.co.uk/daggers/2012/international.html

Peter Donohoe, British concert pianist, reflects on the cultural and musical climate in the Soviet Union and the response in the West. A thought provoking essay on an extraordinary period in music history.

http://www.peter-donohoe.com/en/blog/the-cold-war-and-the-soviet-threat

“But I always remember Ernest Hemingway’s advice to writers: always quit for the day when you know what the next sentence is. ”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/nyregion/on-sundays-robert-a-caro-writes-always-dressed-up.html

Eight authors (including crime writers John Banville aka Benjamin Black, Alexander McCall Smith and Minette Walters) have invented imaginary biographies and character sketches based on fourteen unidentified portraits. Who are these men and women, why were they painted, and why do they now find themselves in the Collection of the National Portrait Gallery? With fictional letters, diaries, mini-biographies and memoirs, Imagined Lives creates vivid stories about these unknown sitters from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

http://www.npg.org.uk/business/publications/imagined-lives-portraits-of-unknown-people/imagined-lives-extracts.php