Who Said Brussels Was Boring?

SUMMERTIME cries out for some beach reading. How about a page-turner on the European Union? On paper, the E.U. is a colossus, with nearly 500 million people and a gross domestic product of around $16 trillion, larger than that of the United States. In practice, the E.U. is an empire of paper, some 90,000 pages laboriously negotiated over half a century. These rules and regulations -- they expand to two million pages once translated into the union's many member languages -- govern everything from bottle labels to agricultural subsidies. Settle into that beach chair. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]