Member Reviews: The New American Chef: Cooking with the Best of Flavors and Techniques from Around the World

I am a devotee of culinary writing. Recipe books and food industry magazines are great tools for learning about trends, improvements in technique and equipment as well as wonderful for gaining insight into a cookbook author's own interest. Of particular significance, I relish a 'local's only' collection of regional fare, even when I am thousands of miles away from being a local. My "down time" reading is almost exclusively food essays, however. I call it leisure reading, with a purpose. These are those books that seem to live on the bottom two shelves at Border's and do not often get much mention at cocktail parties. It always seems that when some social gathering revolves around food,...