Hot Dog: A Global History, by Bruce Kraig (University of Chicago Press, $15.95).

What it is: Bruce Kraig, a professor specializing in food history, conducts a near-microscopic account of the travels, the types, the very elongated being of the hallowed hot dog. The evolution of early meat-mincing devices? You’ll find it here. A brief study of the dwarf in hot dog lore? Did you know the Munchkin coroner from The Wizard of Oz was the first Oscar Mayer mascot? Now you do. It’s an immersive history, heavily illustrated with well-chosen photos from 100 years of wiener culture.

Praise (and quibbles): Kraig has an insatiable appetite for hot dog garnish traditions, and differences from state to state, country to country; a nice treat is the handful of international recipes that close out the book (including a tempting Filipino soy sauce-cabbage-based topping). But those traditions also take on the feel of a roll call, of an exhaustively researched academic litany, spotted with obvious stabs at connecting the meaning of the hot dog (a mutt of ground parts) to the meaning of America itself (a mutt of ground parts). The only detail that seems unaccounted for is the why. Why don’t some areas use ketchup? Why, as Kraig puts it, has California (“highly varied in its hot doggery”) never developed a recognizable hot dog garnishing style?

Why we think you’ll like it: When any book has paragraphs that begin with the words “The hot dogs of New Jersey …” and “A hot dog belongs to the ancient family of encased foods …,” we have trouble putting it down for very long. And Kraig, a talented researcher, has an archaeologist’s enthusiasm for piecing together far-flung, disparate parts.