“Utterly riveting and profoundly disturbing. Journalism at its finest. It would be nearly impossible to understand our ultra-processed age without understanding the rise of the Fanjul family and the inhumanities behind their billions.”

—Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“Sandy Tolan’s superbly reported book is a true saga of obscene wealth, obscene inhumanity and, inevitably, obscene political power. The first sugar barons got rich from slave labor, and their ruthless legacy lives on today in the sweltering cane fields of the Dominican Republic. US price supports enable these horrors while modern sugar barons party with politicians in their Palm Beach mansions. It’s sickening enough to make you give up soft drinks and candy bars forever.”

— Novelist and journalist Carl Hiaasen

"A mesmerizing history of the cane sugar industry, and a devastating indictment of the sugar barons who run it. For those who still think of sugar as a harmless indulgence, this is the book you have to read." 

— Gary Taubes, author of The Case Against Sugar

"Tolan brings history to life, engaging all of our senses in this tour de force that ...draw[s] us into the lives of the rich and famous, past and present, as well as the workers whose labor lies at the base of their fortunes."

Gillian McGillivray, professor of history, York University; author of Blazing Cane

"A well-documented and admirably written saga of a family that, over the course of six generations, spared no resources in making sugar the source of its wealth and power."

— Oscar Zanetti, Cuban Academy of History

“A brilliant, incisive exploration of how sugar, slavery, and power built an empire. Certain sugar barons might want to brace themselves.”

— Amy Serrano, Director of the award-winning documentary, "Sugar Babies"

“Veteran reporter Tolan traveled to the Dominican Republic in 1991 for a story on the trafficking of “men and boys who’d been tricked, coerced, or forced into one of the world’s oldest, most brutal, most unforgiving forms of labor: cutting sugarcane.” He returned 30 years later to investigate conditions under the Fanjul brothers, sugar barons who lived in billionaire luxury in Florida while making a fortune—in the words of a labor lawyer—“on the backs of…workers” on a 250,000-acre plantation. Moreover, Tolan writes, the brothers also own 190,000 sugar-producing acres in the Florida Everglades, an ecological nightmare in that once-wild river of grass. His sweeping history of the industry extends to the days when Christopher Columbus planted the first sugarcane in the Americas. When the Fanjuls arrived in Cuba four centuries later, they directed their marketing energies toward the U.S., which, by the 1930s, owned three-quarters of Cuba’s sugar production until Fidel Castro nationalized it. The Fanjuls relocated to the Dominican Republic and Florida, where, according to a local Florida official, they excelled in “figuring the system out, and making the system work for them.” Americans have since become addicted to sugar, which one environmentalist in Tolan’s account calls “the other white powder.” An unlikely hero of sorts is Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who fired the board overseeing the water in South Florida that flowed abundantly toward the Fanjuls, replacing them with advisers “who were not so deeply in the sugar barons’ sway.” A villain of the book, apart from the sugar barons themselves, is President Trump, who rescinded a Biden-era order banning Dominican sugar imports precisely because of forced labor and human rights violations. It came at a price: The Fanjuls donated $7 million to Trump’s campaigns.

You’ll want to unsweeten your pantry after reading this damning, eye-opening book Starred review, Kirkus (embargoed)

Journalist Tolan (The Lemon Tree) offers a troubling chronicle of the Fanjul sugar dynasty, owners of Domino Sugar and Florida Crystals. The author follows six generations of the family’s “unbroken line of... sugar barons” descended from a 19th-century plantation owner in Cuba, tracing the family through the country’s lavish post-WWI period, their exile to Florida during the Cuban Revolution, and their expansion into the Dominican Republic, where they became the island’s biggest landowner, including of a “posh resort” frequented by American politicians. Tolan starkly juxtaposes the Fanjuls’ astronomical wealth with the appalling conditions endured by their Haitian migrant plantation workers in the DR. What he discovers through his on-the-ground reporting is shocking: stateless migrants trapped in debt and constantly threatened with deportation; squalid barracks with no running water or electricity; a herbicide fumigator suffering from “flu, fever, and rashes all over his body”; and a “Colombian-trained paramilitary force” intimidating journalists. Tolan also vividly revisits the 1986 Dog War in which striking Jamaican workers at the Fanjuls’ Florida property were mauled by police dogs and deported. Tolan’s DR reporting notably marks one of the only times the Fanjuls saw consequences—a ban on importing Domino by the Biden administration, later lifted by Trump. The Fanjuls, Tolan shows, thwart efforts to rein in their abuse through political donations, including to Trump’s ballroom, and by intimidating activists and legislators. It amounts to an enraging account of impervious billionaire power built on exploitation and corruption.”

— Starred review, Publisher's Weekly (embargoed)