This was a bizarre book. It seemed as if it was thrown together on some desktop publishing program and never edited. The wine chapter was hilarious. It was profusely illustrated with pictures of broccoli, raw, cooked, or growing in the field, with captions like "an example of blueberry wine" or "a typical carboy setup". Some of the pictures throughout the book are only partial, as you might see on a webpage which has not fully loaded. And the wine chapter was not the only one affected with mismatched photos and titles, just the funniest. If the fact-checking was no better than the rest of editing (and why should it be?) I don't feel I can trust any information in the book.

Most of the book was fairly general, even superficial, with some very peculiar exceptions. One chapter that was startlingly specific and actually did have appropriate titles to its many photographs was the chapter entirely devoted to the construction of the Chicken Plucking Machine. It's a truly bizarre contraption. There are no instructions for using it, no descriptions of what it is supposed to do (other than "Plucking Chickens") and no pictures of it in use, so I can only imagine that it beats the (hopefully dead) chicken with flailing rubber hoses until feathers fly off.

I borrowed this from my library. I won't be renewing it. ( )