I wanted to like Frederick Kaufman's A Short History of the American Stomach . I really did. How could I not? I write about health and fitness, and I think a lot about our country's love/hate relationship with food. It's hard to ignore it when you consider that 66 percent of American adults are obese or overweight, yet every woman staring at you from a magazine cover is impossibly, photo shopped thin. But I thought there might be a problem with the book when I opened it because of one factor and one factor only: the font size. This is a generously spaced book. The font size is on par with those of young adult novels (it reminded me of Spanking Shakespeare , which was book 3 of 52 ). A lot of the quotes aren't included in paragraphs but broken apart from the narrative. For example, say this block you're reading right now was a portion of the book. The quote would be hung out to dry like this. And the narrative would continue on. It's not un