Paterniti Tracks Down $22 Cheese Which Comes With a Tale

For a few nerve-wracking days in December, it looked as if lovers of the $500-a-pound Serbian donkey’s milk cheese called “pule” were out of luck. Tennis pro Novak Djokovic had bought up the world’s supply, the news media reported -- erroneously, as it turns out.

Pule and Djokovic inhabit a footnote in Michael Paterniti’s “The Telling Room,” which recounts his obsessive pursuit of the story behind another cheese. The sheep’s milk Paramo de Guzman, a mere $22 a pound, caught his eye while he was in graduate school at the University of Michigan in 1991.