Last night, while going through my shelves to select books for donation to the "Culinary Arts" program earlier mentioned, I came to some conclusions which I believe with be of value to all who "thread" here....
1. Barbecue cookbooks are a contradiction in terms. BBQ is a folk art, passed on only through genetics, childhood exposure, harsh experience or long apprenticeships spent hauling wood, building fires and raking coals and shoveling ash for master or self-claimed BBQers. BBQ is highly localized. BBQ in South Carolina and BBQ is South Texas are are different, divergent trails as far apart as Ulan Bator and Uvalde. Expecting an author the successfully educate you to 2 (or more) disparate philosophies of BBQ is like expecting a travel writer to simultaneously cover tourism in the 2 cities mentioned above.
2. There are books about cooking and food, and there are cookbooks. Of the cookbooks available, some are only suitable for prospective users who have large, well-equipped kitchens, a sous chef, a salad chef and a prep artiste (and maybe a pastry chef) standing by. Then there's the necessity of having access to Les Halles or a comparable market facilities.
3. Indian cookbooks (and I love Indian food) are treacherous, written by folks for whom a spice market/bazaar is located a block from their back doors, stocked with two or three thousand common every days components of the dishes they describe. It seems only yesterday that the supermarket chain I frequent had only one fresh or dried chile available, jalapenos. Just to check, I counted on my last visit, finding about 30 now available. Of course, were I in Oaxaca, I'd expect several times as many, each a component of some grand example of Oaxacan cuisine (to go with the local mescal con gusano).
4. If you can't cook a good steak using "Choice" grade beef, you're sure as Hell unlikely to be able to cook a good steak using "Prime" beef. Short of the Apocalypse or some equivalent event, no matter how many stars a hotel bears behind its name, to expect any more than modest quality from a "Room Service" steak falls into the category of vain, forlorn hope. As for airline steaks, far better they should have been banned in perpetuity by the Warsaw Convention than to continue to exist, examples of the greivous ambition of unrealistically ambitious airline catering "chefs" (and how we must greivously answer for it).