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Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate (Penguin, £7.99) is out next week. Definitely one to buy for the brain. Another big book, Fat Land (Penguin, £9.99), looks at the bulging midriffs and quadruple chins of the inhabitants of the US. Greg Critser is an American journalist who has looked at the fat of his land, and wants to know how and why this happened. He nails as culprits the sugar loading and saturation of foods with cheap fats that began about 20 years ago without many becoming aware of it until recently.