• Zingerman's Guide to Better Bacon: Stories of Pork Bellies, Hush Puppies, Rock `N' Roll Music and Bacon Fat Mayonnaise. Ari Weinzweig. Zingerman's Press. $29.99.

What it is: Essentially, no joke here, a bible of all things smoked pig, an engrossing, affably rambling, borderline obsessive one-stop swine seminar, from the winding genealogy of Wilshire-cut British bacon to an appreciation of the physically repulsive lardo (cured back fat from the chubbiest Italian oinkers), with two-dozen bacon-centric recipes that you don't see every day (such as oyster and bacon pilau). That said, what we have here is also a genuine discovery, not widely distributed (yet), the first major release from Zingerman's Press, the new publishing arm of Zingerman's Deli, an ever-expanding Ann Arbor, Mich., institution. Try zingermanspress.com.

Praise (and quibbles): Weinzweig, Zingerman's co-founder, has a conversational writing style so loose, the book unnecessarily sacrifices a bit of the authority you expect from someone knee-deep in pig parts. On the other hand, a lack of pretense is refreshing for a guy who knows the difference between bacon in central Kentucky and bacon in southwestern Kentucky. A handful of recipe photos wouldn't have hurt (the rare Californian dish hangtown fry, which has gorgeous shades of gray and brown, could use a reference point for the uninitiated), but the book's folksy design and left turns (such as the art of the bacon-wrapped saltine) amount to one of the more compulsively readable single-subject food histories we've come across.

Why we think you'll like it: Because it's like a long fun conversation, and because bacon, for which Weinzweig makes a convincing case, has become ``the olive oil of North America,'' its smoke as central to American flavors as olive oil is to the Mediterranean.

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