Despite being primarily famous for writing about the history of various food, Kurlansky is so much better when he's writing about something else. Primarily because it kicks away his crutch of filling pages and pages of his books with recipes (which seem to be his actual passion) rather than just telling the history.

Paper is an example of this. In order to talk about a recipe, he'd have to shoe horn in that it was written on paper, which, thankfully, he does not do. So instead, you actually get the story of the development of paper. And it's actually really interesting! I never realized that wood is a fairly modern paper source, only coming to popularity in the 1840s/50s. Before that, papermakers primarily used old rags that they ground down into pulp.

My two big critiques of the book are 1) Kurlansky won't stop repeating his thesis about the "technology fallacy" and 2) is a little too intent on including his interview subjects in the story. Kurlansky repeats over and over and over again that technology does not spur human development but, rather, human development spurs technology. Regardless of the merits of the point, I don't think bringing it up at least once per chapter is beneficial to the book. 

And for the second issue, the last couple chapters involve little snippets of interviews with papermakers, mostly in Japan and China, about their views on papermaking. The chapters themselves feel like padding the page count and the focus on interviewee comments leads to the chapters having a disjointed feel because there's no flow. Just little vignettes.