THE MILK MAKERS

These are the stiffest, ungainliest cows you will ever have seen--Gibbons cannot draw living creatures--and the diagrammatic depiction of a cow's innards makes the book look like a biology text without explaining how milk is made. (""Some of the digested food goes into the cow's bloodstream, and finally enters her udder, where the milk is made."") What the book does do efficiently is illustrate the actual milking and the subsequent processing of the milk: the cooling; the transport by tank truck to the dairy; the ""standardizing,"" ""pasteurizing,"" and ""homogenizing""; the packaging (how cartons are filled, sealed, dated); the delivery to stores. Not for those who warm to the sight of cows in a pasture or the aroma of a cowbarn--but informative in a mechanical way. JLG.