This book is both fascinating and frustrating. It is not for the beginner, but experienced cookie bakers will find hundreds of interesting cookies, mostly Italian. Despite the Reader's Digest moniker, it is not a collection of All-American cookies, so take the sub-title of this book seriously.
If you are learning how to bake cookies, you should probably avoid this book. There is absolutely no information on ingredients, equipment, or techniques, nor are there hints or suggestions in the individual recipes. The instructions can generously be described as terse and unhelpful. There is no informational or educational information on making cookies.
If you know your way around a cookie sheet, there are more cookie recipes that you will want to try in this book than all the rest of your cookie books combined. I found literally hundreds of cookies that I wanted to try. The lion's share of recipes are rare, hard to find Italian ones; they are significantly different from american, british, french, german, austrian, etc. cookies (the editorial page lists Florence, Italy as the progenitor). On the down side, many of the recipes require adjustment; I found problems like: doughs that were crumbly and never really came together, too much spreading, seemingly under-baked cookies, dry and crumbly cookies, etc. The recipe titles were also a problem; I am reasonably sure that many of these cookies have popular or traditional names, but an awful lot of them have been given generic names, e.g. "date cookies" or "lime and sunflower seed cookies". I suspect that most problems relate to variable methods of flour measurement; Europeans, like Italians, measure flour by weight, but all recipes in this book list flour by volume in cups. Here, I suspect that the recipes were edited at the word processor and not in the kitchen.
People who already know how to bake cookies will find, in this veritable encyclopedia of mostly Italian cookies, a lifetime of appealing cookie recipes.
