New Slavery

From her early beginnings picking and devouring blackberries from the bushes along the dirt paths on her father's 500-acre farm in northern Pennsylvania, to her soft landing decades later amidst the sparking sands and dark shadows of the U.S. Virgin Islands, Shaun A. Pennington has set down a page-turning 400 year saga that begins in 1699 in what is today her backyard. Shaun chronicles, with the clarity and commitment to the verifiable truth honed during her decades as a journalist and supported by her vast life experience, the acquisition of riches reaped over the last four centuries by the continual reincarnation of a handful of rapacious mercenaries inured to human suffering by unquenchable lust for money. Weaving memoir, medicine, and mob tactics, Pennington disabuses us of the notion that our present crisis of obesity, chronic disease, and a broken healthcare system is inevitable, inescapable and intractable. Through detailing her own history as a recovered addict to show how she broke the chains that bound her to physical and emotional bondage, she offers the reader a way out of the centuries-long enslavement born of sugar cultivation and dependency.