General Cooking Questions

Most cookbooks I see are simply a collection of recipes. This doesn't interest me. There are so many online recipe databases that finding a potato soup recipe is trivial. Also, I find most recipes include the same basic ingredients so they are more or less the same.
 
To me an interesting cookbook presents a "way of thinking" rather than a random assortment of recipes that the author finds tasty. To put it another way, I'm interested in cookbooks that have a perspective.  Also, they are almost always more "books about cooking" rather than "cookbooks".