Nonfiction travels from NASCAR to rodeos

Getting trashed
I found myself hesitating before throwing anything in my trash can after reading Elizabeth Royte's "Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash" (Little Brown, $25, will be published in July). It's hard not to compare Royte's book to "Fast Food Nation" — both works examine a subject often taken for granted by stripping it to its core, leaving readers with an unsettling feeling that they should take a hard look at their habits.

Royte decides to follow the path of her household trash, recyclables, compost, and even — yikes — sewage, following them to their various final resting places. Not everyone is thrilled to help her do so. Repeatedly, she's refused access or information from people who'd rather we not look too closely at what's happening to our garbage.

She perseveres, though, eventually following her local "san men" on their route, touring the huge Fresh Kills landfill, witnessing her junk mail get recycled, and teaching herself about the complex world of home composting. (She gets so involved with the latter that she considers subscribing to Worm Digest.)

It's hard not to feel guilty about one's own consumption when reading Royte's book, but she presents her information fairly objectively. For research purposes, she sorts through and weighs her trash every day or so, putting herself on very intimate terms with what her family uses and discards, and learning in the process about products she can reuse or donate, and which ones she may avoid buying in the future. I won't be doing that kind of garbage research anytime soon, but I'll be digesting the food for thought found in "Garbage Land" for a long time to come.    —G.F.C.

Home on the range
For those of us far removed from saddles and bridles, rodeo almost seems to belong to a vanished age. Yet to participants and fans, it lives on, as lively as a bucking bronc. W.K. Stratton's "Chasing the Rodeo: On Wild Rides and Big Dreams, Broken Hearts and Broken Bones, and One Man's Search for the West" (Harcourt, $25) is a fascinating look at an event that's unlikely to ever make the cover of Sports Illustrated.

Speaking of Sports Illustrated, "Chasing the Rodeo" is perhaps best compared to Jeff MacGregor's NASCAR book, "Sunday Money" (see review). Like MacGregor, Stratton travels to the major events for one full season of rodeo, revealing the personalities and peculiarities behind the scenes. He attends "Cowboy Church," watches cowboys play hacky-sack off spurred boots, and discusses the trends in cowboy jeans (still mostly Wranglers for men, but Cinch is coming on  strong).

Stratton also delivers plenty of rodeo history, and doesn't fail to note the contributions made to the sport by African-Americans, Native Americans, Hawaiians and women. One large hole in the book is how the author tap-dances around the topic of how the animals are treated, but in an Author's Note at the book's end, he gently notes that the book was about rodeo as a culture phenomenon, not about animal-welfare issues. Whether you think that should be done in a book about such a controversial world is left to the reader.

Stratton interweaves the story of rodeo with his own personal story. The father he never met, "Cowboy Don," was a rodeo bum who could neither make a living from rodeo nor leave it behind. Smartly, Stratton never allows his personal tale to become maudlin, and it's hard not to come away from the book without a sense of appreciation that the world of cowboys isn't really lost to us after all.    —G.F.C.

Table for one
Having seen the way Steven Shaw can brutally dissect a restaurant review, I can’t help but hesitate to tackle his new book, “Turning the Tables: Restaurants from the Inside Out” (HarperCollins, $25, to be published in August).

Shaw, a lawyer turned food writer who co-founded food site eGullet.com, has a healthy contempt for most food critics, many of whom he sees as vindictive and underqualified. He wants to help the average diner get the best experience possible, and to do so, he takes readers behind the kitchen door at some of the nation’s best restaurants.

The best moments in “Turning the Tables” come in Shaw’s unvarnished portraits of the restaurant world, à la “Kitchen Confidential.” When, for instance, he hangs with the hosts at Eleven Madison Park (lesson: don’t lie about your reservation) or the sous-chef at Gramercy Tavern (lesson: even simple dishes require painstaking work). He brilliantly portrays chef Gray Kunz’s obsessive side as Kunz demands on-the-fly design changes to his new kitchen.

But much time is spent on side dishes — a lengthy chapter about food sourcing diverts from the book’s focus. A promising section about service diverts to a rant on tipping. (While Shaw quite rightly opposes it as failed economics, I would have liked to hear that argument played out among actual waitstaff.)

His issues with critics are often spot-on — including his shredding of the Zagat surveys’ methodology. But it’s not really fair to target reviewers’ occasional mercilessness unless you have a solution for many restaurants’ habit of giving a cold shoulder to guests without a VIP mark next to their names.

Shaw’s most essential advice — pick places you love, become a regular, be rewarded for your repeat business — is unassailable. But it is a view from the kitchen, where chefs pray their profit margins don’t get any thinner. It won’t match many peoples’ dining habits (or budgets). A bit more sympathy for the customer might be in order.    —Jon Bonné

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