Mark Kurlansky’s Milk: A 10,000-Year Food Fracas is a wonderful and engaging history of the dairy world. Kurlansky covers human milk, bovine milk, goat milk, yak milk, lactase, lactose intolerance and much, much more in this worldwide examination. He offers many tasty milk-based recipes, including his own favorite ice cream dish, coupe aux marrons, in the chapter “Everyone’s Favorite Milk.” Milk related controversies including breast feeding, wet nursing, bottle-feeding and what was known as artificial feeding are covered as well. His writing is expansive in its approach. There are excellent indices and a detailed bibliography, making it a fine reference work. Most importantly, the book is utterly readable. A person can open it anywhere and fall into great prose and revelations regarding something so seemingly ordinary as milk. Kurlansky is a charming wordsmith and a prolific one. Be sure to check out his other interesting titles.
Maureen Millea Smith is a librarian at the Edina Library and a Minnesota Book Award-winning novelist.
