Any book about a single item (in this case Sugar), can be either really interesting if the author handles it right, or boring and monotonous if the author decides to recite fact after fact for several chapters. This book is both really interesting at times and really boring at others. It does get better around chapter 11, but by then, I decided skimming was as good a strategy to finish this as any and I didn't lose much.

There is a lot of repetition across the book. Facts are repeated and repeated again (and repeated again in the conclusion - which is less a conclusion and more a summary).

Nevertheless, this is worth reading if only to know more about how the world as it stands today has come to eat as much sugar as it does today. Even with all the above issues, it still does enlighten the reader about how slavery has been at the center of the spread of sugar around the world.