The Cheese Handbook

I was originally very intrigued by The Cheese Handbook as when I was in culinary school I strongly considering going the cheese monger route.  However this was not an easy read. Try as I might I had a very hard time getting into reading it. Many times I felt very lost on what he was speaking of when it came to describing methods and history. Diagrams or pictures of tools would have made much of his descriptions of cheese tools and processes much easier to digest. His descriptions seemed to be a combination of scientific jargon and someone trying to describe something he doesn't necessarily know the name of the tool.  
I was somewhat relieved to finally get to a portion of the book that included recipes, but most of the recipes that were included in the narrative seemed to be incomplete and hard to follow and assumed that the reader knew how to make sauces instead of describing how to make the sauces as part of the recipe. I personally know how to make a veloute and bechamel, but I doubt most readers could make one without the recipe. There was a list of recipes in the appendix that I had hoped had clearer recipes to the ones listed previously but alas most were different recipes, including a recipe for French Onion Soup that was completely different from the same soup recipe earlier in the book. And many of the recipes in the appendix ended up seeming just as incomplete as those within the narrative.
The recipes within the book many times read as if a friend was trying to recall a favorite recipe versus a proper written recipe. And many of the "American" classic cheese recipes, as an American, I have never heard of, such as the "Frozen Cheese Ring". I can only assume that that dish was something popular when the first edition was released and the updates to the book did not included updating recipes to what are currently trending cheese recipes. And there were no actual recipes to make cheese. All the recipes were to make other food items that had cheese in them.
The saving grace for me at least was that the actual cheese descriptions by country that were very in depth and informative. I would have liked (in the appendices) a chart of some sort that compared the various cheeses from countries or even listed from most pungent to blandest. This section was the only part that I personally would have used as reference material.

I received this book for review at NetGalley.