I like whiskey. And, after years spent focusing primarily on Irish whiskeys, I recently started branching out, exploring more in the Scotch whisky and bourbon lines. While I've enjoyed various excursions into the field, I've been wanting to know more about what I'm drinking.

Tadio Diller's brief Whiskey is a start -- but barely so.

The book is less than 35 pages, and the author uses a large font to fill even that space. And, while there are some interesting tidbits on the differences between whiskey types and a bit of trivia on the spirit's history, Diller never goes very deep into the topic.

There are enough typographical errors here that you'll cry out for an editor. And I'll confess, a book that opens with a plea for favorable reviews on Amazon strikes me as amateurish at best. (So, too, does the line in the introduction that thanks readers for downloading the book; mine was a printed edition.)

All told, Diller's work is fairly light on research. As one Amazon reviewer (who, like me, disregarded Diller's plea) noted, it reads more like a school research paper than an actual scholarly work on an interesting subject. Even a section of cocktail recipes is sparse and unimaginative.

A quick glance on Amazon shows that Diller has written a fair number of similarly brief books (pamphlets?) on beverages from coffee and tea to champagne and beer. One might imagine he wrote them all after one short afternoon on Google.