If “The Map of True Places” were slid into a book MRI (bMRI), we would likely see faint yellow patches in the plot and idea regions but the character region would be lit bright red. Barry found the sweet spot for her characters, neither vessels for carrying a plot nor too squirrely to believe. In fact, her characters seem observed, rather than created. Places (maritime New England) and afflictions (Parkinson’s disease) are characters too, changing with time and circumstance. Every good novel should make you want to do something. I want to learn the names of the signpost stars in the wheeling night sky, not to navigate the open sea but to be more at home wherever I find myself.

Like the labels on wine bottles, this book has flavors of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground and of Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate with a hint of Douglas Adams' The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. The setting is a Russia so squalid that people are almost feral. The inhabitants of the story live in a derelict apartment building. Daily life has its price, especially for use of the latrine in the courtyard of the apartment building. One of the characters is Undead, not as a sexy vampire but simply harder to get rid of than athlete’s foot. Reading this book took a long time, not because it is literary fiction (and so more about character than plot) but because I stopped to take lots of notes - quotes to add to my commonplace book and examples of gorgeously-constructed writing. One of the characters keeps a notebook always at hand (we get an occasional look at the contents), a reminder to all of us readers and writers to Pay Attention. The apartment building is a microcosm of the Russian melting pot but the older inhabitants haven’t melted and so have the solace and burden of ancestral identities. Perhaps the best gifts of this book are the reminders that dreams are the most substantial things we can have and that color can be found in the drabbest places, if looked for.

This is a historical novel, not in the usual sense of time travel to the past, but rather the solving of a puzzle using clues from history. Like all good literary puzzles, the intellectual tour is at least half the fun; we learn lots about the history of astronomy and visit Spain, Italy and the Canary Islands. The rules of literary (as opposed to genre) thrillers seem to preclude plot-quickening devices, such as exploding helicopters. So, sometimes the plot seems thick with clue-providing conversations, the characters having impressive stores of historical knowledge at the ready recall. History buffs will enjoy reading the book with a notebook in hand, to keep dates, people and places sorted out, sketching the web woven as the book unfolds. For many of us though, the afterimage of the book will be the estrangement of science and religion and the essential task of reconciliation.

Standage writes on “… the intersections between food history and world history, to ask a simple question: which foods have done most to shape the modern world, and how?” So, this book is coarse-grain history, telling us about the sprouting of civilizations from the domestication of wheat, barley, rice, corn, and potatoes. We “follow the food” as trade (especially in spices) cross-fertilizes the cultures of continents. “Give us this day our daily bread” makes logistics as important as munitions in waging war and give tyrants an almost irresistible means of coercion. Perhaps the best fodder for reading groups is the generous view of the green revolution and industrial agriculture, provoking discussion of food that is at least local, if not slow.

I suspect that readers of books on history naturally form two groups: those driven by narrative and those for whom history is visual and illustrations are essential. I especially missed having enough readable maps showing past peoples and the connecting arrows that signify camel routes and voyages in small wooden ships. This was remedied by having “The Times Atlas of World History” close at hand.*

Food is the everything of our lives, from food stamps to the commodity prices of the corn that makes the tortillas in the barrios to the omega-3-containing salmon that might save our hearts. “An Edible History of Humanity” could be a good short course in a curriculum of books about food.

*Editor's note, Mark was reviewing an advanced reader's copy (ARC) of An Edible History of Humanity, oftentimes maps and other illustrations are not included in the ARC but are available in the finished version.

From middle age on, the term “senior moment” carries the hope that a forgotten name is just the slow slide into mild fuzziness and not the first sign of Alzheimer ’s disease. Sue Halpern’s book “Can’t Remember What I Forgot: the Good News from the Front Lines of Memory Research” fits within David Quammen’s “Go Forth and Observe with a Probing Mind” lineage of science writing. Halpern visits laboratories and interviews researchers working on Alzheimer’s disease and memory. However, Halpern allows her own probing mind to be probed, taking us along while she subjects herself to brain scans and memory tests. A therapy to prevent or mitigate Alzheimer’s seems always “five years away.” Promising drugs that work on cells in a dish (or for mice) often don’t work in people (or cause unacceptable collateral damage). Some self-help may be helpful; aerobic exercise and eating colorful fruits and vegetables seem more therapeutic than crossword puzzles and pills. The Good News of the book title is that scientists seem close to crossing the border from correlation to causation and finding simplicity at the molecular heart of memory loss.

Novels set in familiar places are often a disappointment. We expect the places and institutions and people to be accurate, even though we know that the author has a license to write fiction. So I came to this novel - Red Rover by Deirdre McNamer - anchored in the Sweet Grass Hills of Montana (ancestral homestead of my father) prepared to say "That's not how it is." But Deidre McNamer got the Hills, and the story's transect south to Butte and Missoula, exactly true to place.

A few years ago, during a family vigil at a residential nursing facility (coincidentally, in Missoula), I matched up the often silent and wheelchair-ridden residents with the photos and biographies of their younger selves, posted at their room entrances. In Red Rover, these life stories come in decadal chapters that mostly work in time-tidal rhythms, working forward from the 1920's and backwards from the present, slowly revealing the wartime betrayal of a favorite son (" ,,, a time collision so violent it threw certain humans away").

This is a coming-of-age novel, not just of adolescence, but of the greater courage needed near the end of life. In the end, McNamer shows us the survivors. Those who are uprooted and transplanted do poorly. Those who are at home, who don't need a GPS unit to know exactly where they are, are rooted and ready.