OH GOD, another year, another book by Tony Bourdain, the trash-talking ex-prepster media chef (catch him on Food Network – if you dare) who in 2000 favored us with Kitchen Confidential. That book was the intermittently amusing chronicle of Bourdain's glamorously seedy career as a chef, replete with a Dickensian cast of vaguely criminal characters and a jabberingly neurotic narrative voice that, despite being très New York City, apparently helped make the book into a huge success.

It seems the publisher thought so, for now Bourdain returns with an encore performance, A Cook's Tour (Bloomsbury, 274 pages, $25.95). The new book is nominally about Bourdain's globe-trotting in search of the perfect meal, but really it is, like Kitchen Confidential, all about Bourdain.

If you like Bourdain's I-me-mine obsessiveness, you probably liked K.C., and you'll probably like A Cook's Tour, too. I didn't, and don't. K.C. had about 25 pages of real writing, padded up with hooey to make it a bad book rather than a good essay. And I found the new volume intolerable. Bourdain the narrator is like an insane man who lurches out of a dark alley, grabs you by the collar, and starts to talk endlessly about himself, leaving you with nothing to do but feel his hot (and garlicky!) breath on your neck while you wait for him to tire – or find someone else to inflict his superfluities on.

Assuming you escape, you might want to pick up Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, which has just been published in paperback (Perennial, 364 pages, $13.95). It is as necessary a work for understanding what modern America is really like as the works of Bourdain are unnecessary. Fast Food Nation contains a number of brilliant set pieces of reportage on such subjects as the factories that produce french fries and the New Jersey chemical plants that produce flavor for food that's been processed to flavorlessness.

But at a deeper level the book describes an America in which the values of oligarchic industry – homogenization, profits, cost cutting, a ruthless view of people not as people but as consumers – have overwhelmed human values. Schlosser does give McDonald's credit for forcing more humane treatment of slaughter-bound animals, but that good deed does not begin to compensate for the enormous harm the fast-food industry has caused, to the land, the culture, the people. He could as easily have called his book Fat Food Nation. But then, he didn't need to.