Peter de Polnay
Personal Information
Description
Peter de Polnay (Hungarian: Polnay Péter) was a Hungarian-born English novelist and non-fiction writer who wrote over 80 books. Although de Polnay began his first novel on a bet, writing soon became his profession and main source of income. He wrote at a feverish pace, completing forty novels in just forty-five years. After the war, he settled into a fairly predictable pattern of finishing one book in time for the summer holidays and another just ahead of the Christmas season. De Polnay wrote under at least two pseudonyms. Between 1961 and 1966, W. H. Allen & Co. published three novels using the pseudonym [Rodney Garland]( which had been used by the Hungarian emigre writer Adam Martin de Hegedus for two novels with homosexual subject matter: The Heart in Exile (1953) and The Troubled Midnight (1956). After de Hegedus's death in October 1955, de Polnay wrote World Without Dreams (1961), Hell and High Water (1963), and Sorcerer's Broth (1966). W. H. Allen & Co. also published six novels that de Polnay wrote using the pseudonym Jessamy Morrison: The No-Road (1963); The Wind Has Two Edges (1964); The Girl from Paris (1965); Rusty (1966); The Office Party (1967); and The Widow (1972). Most of the Morrison novels dealt with lesbian and homosexual themes and de Polnay may have used the pseudonym to avoid problems with the Catholic Church.
Books
The Fat of the Land
This book is essential reading for anyone who wishes to eat an all-meat diet or wants to learn more about the health benefits of a low-carbohydrate diet of meat and fish. Arctic explorer and anthropologist Vilhjálmur Stefánsson spent years living with indigenous Inuit and Eskimo people. He noted their general healthiness (and good teeth), and an absence of many of the diseases that plagued western cultures, such as scurvy, heart disease, and diabetes. Observing their dietary habits, he determined that their primary food was meat, both lean and fatty, and that their diets were very low in sugary or starchy carbohydrates. Was this meaty diet the key to their good health? The book chronicles a 1928 scientific experiment, conducted by the Russell Sage Institute of Pathology at Bellevue Hospital in New York, in which Stefansson and his colleague Dr. Karsten Andersen ate a meat-only diet for one year. The two men stayed healthy and fared very well, leading him to claim that we should reexamine our notion of what foods constitute a healthy diet.