Personal and professional relationships intertwine in this gritty British police drama.  The Sweeney is the elite Flying Squad of the London Metropolitan Police.  They use their own unique tactics to take down armed robberies throughout the city.  They are led in the field by a throwback of an officer, DI Jack Regan, whose standard tactics are threats, intimidation, and brute force, which the rest of his squad emulates.  No-one is spared; not even his police colleagues.

A small time robbery at a jewellery shop, but with an unexpected and brutal murder, leads The Sweeney to a much larger bank job in central London.  Against orders, they go in with guns blazing with disastrous consequences for the squad and bystanders alike.  Regan and his closest ally DC George Carter must pick up the pieces of the investigation despite the threat of suspension and arrest.

This is an intense movie.  Feelings are strong between characters, the violence is brutal at times, and the profanity is pervasive.  Yet for all that, I didn’t feel much of anything for this movie or its characters.  There was absolutely zero tension, and I felt no strong loyalties or hatreds towards any of the characters.  In the end, it was a standard police drama with a predictable end.  By the way, unless you`re thoroughly familiar with the London accent, I suggest you turn on the English subtitles.  Even then, some of the slang is totally incomprehensible.

Available at VPL on DVD, starring Ray Winstone, Ben Drew and Damian Lewis (Homeland).

Many will look at the title of this book and say, “So what?  We all know that too much salt, sugar, fat is bad for you.  That’s old news.”  That’s all true, but do you know why?  Do you know why we can’t stop eating these things, and do you know how the processed food companies make sure we never stop, and how they sink the hook ever deeper?  This book will tell you, and in minute detail.

Available at Vaughan Public Libraries in print, audio CD, and digital audio.

In the Garden of Beasts, by Erik Larson is an excellent account of the lead-up to the so-called Night of the Long Knives when Hitler and Goering purged the Nazi ranks of all their opponents and enemies, June 30, 1934, with political assassinations numbering in the hundreds.  This from the point of view of the American ambassador William Dodd.  I always wondered what America was thinking by allowing Hitler to consolidate his power.  Now I know: it was exactly what the rest of Europe was thinking.  They viewed Hitler, Goebbels, and Goering as brutal adolescents, and were simply hoping against hope that the Nazi regime would collapse under the weight of their own paranoia, even as they saw it becoming stronger and stronger.  Ignored by the U.S. State Department, Dodd’s voice of warning was one crying in the wilderness, and only years later would his warnings prove correct.

The only problem I have with this book is having to endure the long passages about Dodd’s daughter Martha, her numerous affairs, her sexual exploits, her political naivete, and her pretensions of being a writer.  There hardly seemed any point in the long passages about her picnics with Soviet attache Boris Vinogradov and her various attempts to make him jealous with her many lovers.  The author could have noted her presence and her importance at key moments but otherwise have left her out of the main narrative.  I guess the author felt compelled to make her a main character in this story only because she wrote a memoir of that time, unlike Dodd’s wife and son who were also with him in Berlin.  The story and the way it’s told makes it  tailor-made for Hollywood, so we can expect to see the movie some time in 2014 starring Tom Hanks and Natalie Portman.