Author: Jennifer Graham

Burn,by Peter Heller (Knopf, 291 pages)

Jess and Storey have been friends since they were kids growing up in a small town in southern Vermont. As adults, they maintained their friendship, in part by spending several weeks each year hunting off the grid. In fact, it was those trips that killed Jess’s marriage. His wife wasn’t happy with his lengthy absences to hunt and fish when he couldn’t make time to vacation with her.

Jess is still mourning the loss of his wife and dog, and clutching the prayer stone that Jan had once given him, when he joins Storey to hunt in north-central Maine one September. But his personal tragedy soon shrinks in the middle of a bigger one.

When the men try to return to civilization after more than a week off the grid, they find that civilization, as they know it, has vanished — the bridge they’d previously crossed blown up, no cell service, towns incinerated, the residents missing except for a few corpses.The second Civil War, it seems, has come to New England.

Burn is novelist Peter Heller’s take on a popular theme: the idea that America’s polarization could lead to secession and war, trivialized by some with the euphemism “national divorce.” There have been numerous fiction and nonfiction books exploring this theme, and a movie earlier this year.

But Burn is no made-for-Hollywood thriller that exploits the country’s tensions. It aims higher with a story that explores family, betrayal, secrets and friendship. The savage conflict is just an accelerant that elevates the stakes.

The story begins with Jess and Storey emerging from the woods to find a gory mystery: Where are the people who lived in the incinerated towns? Why were their cars torched, while boats at the marina were left untouched? And most pressing of all, who was responsible? The federal government, or militias, or a foreign invader? “Jess began to carry a stone in his gut he recognized as dread,” Heller writes.

The men, both in their late thirties, surmised that the violence was related to “secession mania” that had pitted Mainers against each other. “But no one had expected it to come to full-bore civil strife. They had discussed the risk while planning the trip and decided that what was happening in Maine was no worse than the stirrings of revolt in Idaho and the failed secession vote in Texas the year before. These were fringe minorities, vocal and passionate, but not a real threat.”

Storey — who lives in Burlington, Vermont, with his wife and two daughters — and Jess, who lives in Colorado — have no dog in this fight. But they also have no way to get out, once they realize that all the combatants seem to be shooting everyone they see on sight. Their primary problem is sheer survival as they try to figure out how to escape what seems to have become a war zone.

They scavenge food and coffee from boats, and camp deep in the woods, as they plot a way out. Storey grows increasingly worried about his family, while Jess ruminates on what he has already lost, and his teenage years, providing flashbacks into his pre-apocalypse life, in which he spent most of his time with Storey’s idyllic, warm family, feeling unloved by his own parents, who mostly seemed to care about books.

There is little time for contemplation, however, as the men have to keep moving. The danger they are in is underscored when helicopters appear without warning, firing on someone in a boat, and at one point the two friends have to fire on other men who are shooting at them; while both are experienced hunters, neither has ever shot at another human being, let alone killed one. And by means of a ham radio they come across, they are able to learn snippets of what is transpiring around them, from a Canadian broadcast in French.

All of this provides tension enough to sustain a whole book, but Heller surprises his readers with two turns of events — one in the present day, one in the past — that raise the stakes even beyond the hellscape they are navigating. The introduction of these subplots adds complexity to the men’s journey, and at one point threatens their friendship.

Full disclosure: I was already a Heller fan, having read 2012’s The Dog Stars, 2014’s The Painter and 2023’s The Last Rangers (and given each of them an A). But not every author gets better with age, and with the subject matter, I was prepared for Burn to disappoint. It did not.

An accomplished outdoorsman who grew up in New York, went to high school in Vermont and attended Dartmouth College, Heller’s writing is suffused with knowledge of nature and sport, and New England. In Burn, he uses the names of real towns, not fictional ones, which might be disconcerting to lovers of Maine, as the conflict widens. But it’s also interesting to see this sort of story, which a more predictable writer might have set in a southern state, play out where it does.

The problem with a book like Burn is that the reader is anxious to get to the end to find out what happens to the characters, but at the same time doesn’t want their story to end. Heller has not written sequels before, but Burn is deserving of one. While he delivers as satisfying an ending as possible in a story this bleak, we still want to know what happens next.

“Always leave them wanting more” is a phrase attributed to P.T. Barnum. Heller employs the tactic well. Still, I’d pay $50 cash right now for Burn 2. A

—Jennifer Graham

The Singularity is Nearer, by Ray Kurzweil (Viking, 312 pages)

If there is anyone who can envision how artificial intelligence will change our lives in the next few decades, it’s Ray Kurzweil, whose title at Google includes the words “AI visionary.”

Kurzwell has been working in the industry for more than six decades. So when he tells us that “the singularity” — the merger of humans with AI — is likely to occur by 2045 and will be “utterly transformative,” we’d best pay attention.

Building on his 2005 book The Singularity is Near, Kurzweil examines the developments in AI since then, as well as its impact on jobs, health, longevity, and the risks that technology poses. It’s widely believed that AI will soon pass the “Turing test” — the point at which AI’s response to questions is indistinguishable from humans’ — which Kurzweil expects to occur by 2029. That milestone, he believes, will launch us into the fifth epoch of development, connecting our brains with computers that “will allow us to add many more layers to our neocortices — unlocking vastly more complex and abstract cognition than we can currently imagine.”

Augmented in this way, the enhanced human brain will eventually “become more than 99.9 percent nonbiological” in two ways, Kurzweil says: “One is the gradual introduction of nanobots to the brain tissue itself. These may be used to repair damage or replace neurons that have stopped working. The other is connecting the brain to computers, which will both provide the ability to control machines directly with our thoughts and allow us to integrate digital layers of neocortex in the cloud.”

As AI is advancing even quicker than many futurists initially believed, it seems the digitization of the human mind will likely happen within the lifetimes of many people who are alive today. Kurzweil, who lives near Boston, is 76 and he believes he will live to see it.

“As nanotechnology takes off, we will be able to produce an optimized human body at will: we’ll be able to run much faster and longer, swim and breathe under the ocean like fish, and even give ourselves working wings if we want them,” Kurzweil writes. “We will think millions of times faster, but most importantly we will not be dependent on the survival of any of our bodies for our selves to survive.”

There’s another, controversial word for all this, which Kurzweil doesn’t use: transhumanism. And much of what Kurzweil envisions is dependent on nanotechnology, the development and implantation of nanobots, almost unimaginably tiny robots that could roam our bodies, repairing or removing malfunctioning cells. (To give you an idea of scale, there are more than 25 million nanometers in an inch; Kurzweil describes a nanobot as about the size of a human cell.)

While some forms of medical nanotechnology are already in testing on animals, the life-changing nanobots that Kurzweil is talking about don’t actually exist yet. He’s largely talking about what could happen, and the future may not be as rosy as he thinks.

He acknowledges as much in a chapter titled “Peril” in which he examines scenarios where AI doesn’t help us but leads to the mass extinction of anything carbon-based. He nods at Bill Joy’s famous essay “The Future Doesn’t Need Us,” published in 2000 in Wired magazine, and the “gray goo” theory, which posits that self-replicating nanobots that consume or otherwise destroy living things could wipe out the Earth’s biomass within a matter of weeks. Nanobots could also be used as military weapons, delivering virtually undetectable poisons to whole populations. But the technology can also be used for defense systems, and technology companies are taking these sorts of doomsday scenarios seriously and devising safeguards.

While Kurzweil is trying to write for a general audience, and largely succeeds, the book at times descends into college-textbook dryness when he explains various technologies. But he turns out to be a surprisingly engaging philosopher as he navigates the ethical issues surrounding AI.

A chapter titled “Who Am I?” examines subjective consciousness, or qualia, and the trouble with assuming AI can never acquire it, as well as the issues that arise as we get closer to “resurrecting” the dead with avatars or replicants created using photos and video, texts, interviews and other data about loved ones. (Kurzweil has done something like this with his own father, collecting everything his father had ever written, including love letters to his mother, and then using AI to have a “conversation” with his deceased father, or as he put it, his “dad bot.”)

Another question he delves into is how much of our essential selves we might lose as our body parts — even the brain — are rebuilt as Lee Majors was in the old TV series The Six Million Dollar Man.

Kurzweil recalls the thought experiment of ancient Greeks who pondered what happens when an old ship is gradually rebuilt using new planks. If the old planks are stored and then reassembled into a ship again, which is the original? The stakes are higher when it comes to human beings. “For most of us, it matters a great deal whether the person standing next to us is really our loved one or is just a Chalmersian zombie putting on a convincing show.”

For those of us who can live long enough to take advantage, Kurzweil assures us that “radical life extension is close at hand.” That may make you want to start exercising and eating right, or to take up drinking and smoking posthaste. Either seems a rational decision, given what is headed our way. B

—Jennifer Graham

The Cliffs, by J. Courtney Sullivan (Knopf, 369 pages)

When her ne’er-do-well mother dies, Jane Flanagan’s only inheritance is a dog named Walter, “an orange powder puff of a thing” that Jane was convinced her mother loved more than her daughters. She knew her mother had nothing of value to pass on, but “Walter was so much worse than nothing.”

Even in death, her mother caused Jane trouble.

In life, her mother’s drinking and other poor choices led the teenage Jane to hide out at an abandoned house, pale purple and creepy, that sat on a cliff overlooking the ocean in Maine. The home had been built in 1846 and it had the vibe of houses abandoned in zombie movies — dusty furniture, random toys, a collapsed railing, food expired decades ago that animals had gotten into. Still, Jane felt drawn to the house and didn’t feel she was breaking any laws by going into it to sit quietly or read: “It felt like honoring whatever came before.”

That’s how we meet Jane in The Cliffs, the sixth novel of acclaimed Massachusetts author J. Courtney Sullivan. A smart and conscientious young woman, Jane soon leaves the dumpster fire that is her family home, earns multiple degrees, travels and gets a great job and boyfriend. The purple house recedes in her mind.

Meanwhile, the house beckons another woman, Genevieve, who is the polar opposite of Jane. Married, moneyed and entitled, Genevieve convinces her husband to buy the house and to entrust her with its renovation as a vacation house for the family of three. Unlike Jane, she is not respectful of the home’s history; when a contractor she hired to install an infinity pool overlooking the ocean discovers a small cemetery, she has no qualms about disturbing the dead.

Not long afterward, Genevieve is shaken when she walks into her young son’s room and finds him conversing with a girl that he claims to see, but she can’t. And we’re off and running with what at first appears to be a classic New England ghost story. Only it’s not.

While there are ghosts in The Cliffs, and a psychic named Clementine who claims to connect Jane with her mother and grandmother, the sprawling story is primarily about human beings who are alive, or once were, and their legacies. Rich in history, it also delves into the lives of indigenous people who named the (fictional) town Awadapquit, and the ethical issues of living on their land. (“What does it mean to acknowledge that this land had been stolen, when no one had any intention of giving it back?” Sullivan writes.)

These are side stories that are so expertly woven into the narrative that they never feel preachy or pretentious.

As the story progresses, Jane returns to her hometown to help clean out her mother’s house, and also to escape fallout from an alcohol-induced humiliation that is also threatening her job and her marriage. Meanwhile, Jane’s friend Allison’s mother, who was a mother surrogate for Jane when she was in high school, is slipping into dementia, and Allison connects Jane with Genevieve, who wants someone to research previous owners of the house.

There’s more than one mystery here: In addition to the spirit that Genevieve’s son thinks he sees, Jane had been told by a psychic that she needed to get a message from a girl identified only by the initial “D” to her mother, assuring her that she is at peace.

Jane, who has a Ph.D. in American history, hadn’t wanted to meet with this medium at all — the visit was a gift, and she is highly skeptical of psychics in general, and bewildered as to why some random child would be connected in any way to her family.

“And by the way, why is it that dead people always come back to tell their loved ones, ‘I’m at peace.’? Why is it never, ‘This absolutely sucks, get me out of here,?’ Jane tells Allison when recounting the visit.

As in every human life, there is so much pain that the characters don’t see, much of it caused by each other.

“Human beings did so much damage to one another just by being alive. To the people they loved most, and to the ones they knew so little about that they could convince themselves they weren’t even people,” Sullivan writes.

We also all have ghosts, real or not, in the sticky shadows of people who have passed and left their mark on us. The Cliffs is a study of family that is deeply affecting, even if you don’t care much for the learning about spirits, like why children are receptive to ghosts (it’s said that they see parts of the electromagnetic spectrum that older people can’t) and what happens at a real-life “spiritualist camp meeting” in Maine (renamed Camp Mira in The Cliffs, but which is actually called Camp Etna).

(Unrelated to spirits, but New Hampshire also has a couple of cameos in here — Jane sneaks across state lines to buy alcohol, and a pivotal event happens while one character is on a fellowship at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough.)

Lots of dubious writers come to be “New York Times best-selling authors” through marketing campaigns and purchasing gimmicks. The Cliffs is fresh evidence that Sullivan is one by virtue of talent. It is an engrossing and deeply New England novel, with characters that will burrow into your heart. A

Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones, by Priyanka Mattoo (Knopf, 304 pages)

American women who chafe at the Sisyphean nature of household chores will adore Priyanka Mattoo’s grandfather.

A physics professor who once calmly shot a python in his house, he raised free-range kids at his family’s compound in India. If the children weren’t at school, “they were up to something, somewhere in the house, unsupervised,” and his household rules were simple, Mattoo writes: “study, don’t lie, and don’t embarrass the family.”

More importantly, Nanaji (“nana” is the word for the maternal grandfather in Hindi, “ji” the suffix of respect) insisted that the girls and women around him do no menial household work, believing “The only useful pursuits for a young woman were those of the mind.”

In her engrossing new memoir, Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones, Mattoo recalls another family story: Her mother decided to take up knitting as a teen and was working on a sweater when her father sternly asked why she was doing that. “Did all the stores burn down?” he demanded.

Nananji was not against work, just domestic labor, and as such, Mattoo’s mother, and indeed the whole extended family, became remarkably competent adults and “pathologically assertive women.”

“The Kaul girls — doctors, engineers, professors, and some now grandmothers — have no patience for wallflowers, or fools. They enter every unfamiliar room as though they own it. Greet each stranger as though they’ve been reading up.” She adds, “I’m not sure anyone on that side of my family knows how to whisper, and I’m happier for it.”

But despite this remarkably strong and loving family unit, Mattoo and her immediate family suffered the loss of their treasured family home in Kashmir, the region at the center of a bitter territorial dispute between Pakistan and India. The property was ransacked and destroyed by militants, and the family lost not just their physical center but also the decorative contents gathered from all over the world. It is these precious belongings that give the book its title. “Bird milk and mosquito bones” is a phrase Kashmiris use to describe things “so rare and precious that the listener should question their very existence.”

Mattoo’s writing is exquisite in exactly that way, and she builds this series of discrete and elegant essays on the scaffolding of her transcontinental search for home in the aftermath of loss. Her experiences are often exotic by American standards; she writes somewhat disparagingly of the homogeneity of the American experience:

“What a crazy place America is, where you can drive for three straight days and everyone’s still speaking English, and all were seemingly raised on the same episodes of eighties television. But they’ll tell me, in a lather, that the barbecue is dry here, whereas in another place it’s more … wet.”

She adds, “I stare blankly, feeling like an alien that’s landed on a well-meaning planet, one that believes that it is the beating heart of the universe.” She’s got a point.

But there are universal themes here, of longing and loss and the desire for connection. And this is ultimately a book about family, one that is frankly captivating. Here, for example, is Mattoo’s description of a family vacation: “ … we vacation hard, my family. Ideally three weeks, and always a home rental, never a hotel. We settle in like we own the place and have always owned the place. … In the places we stay, there is no turndown service, often no air-conditioning, and the elevator always breaks on day two.”

A “thinky” child, Mattoo is now married with children and lives in the United States, and “presents as American” but is always searching for connection with her home continent. When a music app recommends a song that she becomes obsessed with (“Pasoori” by Ali Sethi), she tracks down the artist, who is from Pakistan, and asks him to speak on WhatsApp (“official communication tool of the global diaspora”). She says, “I need to connect with the person who has made me feel this way.” She later connects with another Pakistani singer, who turns out to also be a medical doctor. “Our countries still bristle with tension — they might always — but I’m encouraged by evidence of this generation’s desire to create,” she writes.

Mattoo veers off delightfully into asides about her children and her childhood. Consider this opening to an essay titled “You Are My Life,” which may be the best start to a chapter I read this year:

“The only grudge I ever held was in nursery school, thanks to a tiny witch named Christina.”

Or this, from a chapter simply titled “A Toothache”:

“I had a terrible toothache the summer my great-aunt Indra was murdered, but that wasn’t the worst part.”

One of the most interesting essays involves Mattoo’s search for a husband, aided in part by her parents, who respectfully asked if she’d be open to them setting her up — a challenge since they were by then living in the United States, where there are about 400 Kashmiri Pandit families, in which there were about 20 “single, age-appropriate men.” Mattoo said OK, but she wanted someone who would make her laugh, to which her mother said, “Funny’s not important!” But funny was. She wound up marrying a Jewish comedy writer.

The book appears to have taken shape in Peterborough at the MacDowell Artists Colony, where the author was in residence in 2022, working on a book that was then titled “16 Kitchens.” That’s now the title of a chapter in Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones, in which Mattoo talks more about her mother and the family’s experience of living in Saudi Arabia, where the weather felt like “being warmed up in a low oven.” The MacDowell team can be proud of this one. As can Mattoo’s Nanaji. It’s been a while since I enjoyed a collection of essays so much. A

The Midnight Feast, by Lucy Foley (William Morrow, 350 pages)

The jacket of Lucy Foley’s The Midnight Feast promises a “deliciously twisty murder mystery,” which is more a nod to the title than a description of the book itself.

Foley, a British author who has been compared to Agatha Christie, has enjoyed success in the genre (her 2020 book The Guest List was a Reese’s Book Club pick) despite a parade of cookie-cutter covers that may be all the rage but to me suggests that the content within lacks originality.

That can’t be said of The Midnight Feast, which is complexly plotted and tries at times to deliver cultural commentary within the core mystery. But the novel suffers from an unsatisfying pileup of perspectives that prevents readers from developing any real connection with the characters.

The Midnight Feast begins at the gala opening of an opulent resort called “The Manor,” which overlooks a cliff on the Dorset Coast in southern England. The owner, Francesca Meadows, is a wealthy wellness influencer of sorts reminiscent of Gwyneth Paltrow, and is determined to give her guests a goopy good time despite the objection of locals who believe her dream estate has desecrated sacred ground.

Francesca, “very good at living in the now,” wears a black opal ring because the stone signifies “purification for the body and soul” and “provides you with a shield against energy.” She’s very much into crystals. Every room at The Manor has a selection of stones in it for the guests’ well-being and sticks of sage to burn “for cleansing.” The place has signature scents and a signature cocktail whose ingredients include ginger, vodka and a dash of CBD oil. The guests themselves are “carefully curated” to keep out the wrong kind of people.

Francesca, newly married to the architect who designed The Manor’s infinity pool, is introduced as something of a dopey villain. Disdainful of the locals and their spooky folk tales, she is scheming to acquire an old farm down the road where “the animals look sad, like they’re begging for a better life. They honestly do!”

She inherited the property from her grandmother, and she had treated her grandfather poorly in his last years of life, thinking that he was simply daft when he warned her repeatedly, “You must keep the birds happy; don’t upset the birds.”

The birds, of course, aren’t literal birds in this context, although there are plenty of them in the story, which is heavy-handed with the bird imagery. According to local legend, The Birds are human-size creatures with beaked faces that occupy the woods and demand sacrifices and on occasion take a life for themselves, leaving behind a feather or two.

Snippets of this are revealed as the story unfolds in staccato, told by five narrators interspersed with excerpts from the diary of one of the characters, and yes, this is just confusing as it sounds. In fact it’s more confusing than it sounds because the story also jumps around in time, from June 2025 to July 2010, and back and forth between the day before the solstice (i.e. the titular “midnight feast”) and the day after it. There’s so much whiplash here that the book could be a ride at the Big E.

The narrators include Bella, a single mother who has come alone to opening weekend for reasons that we learn right away are Very Mysterious, since she has brought with her a folder of articles about Francesca.

There’s also Eddie, a young employee at The Manor, whose family owns the dilapidated farm down the road and who is hiding from his family the fact that he works here. There’s Owen, Francesca’s new husband, who doesn’t seem to be a very happy newlywed; and a DI (detective inspector) named Walker who is tasked with investigating a fire and mysterious deaths at the property. Along with Francesca, they all take turns narrating what’s happening in real time and revealing snippets of the past that connect them to each other and to the land.

Although the language is simple (too much so, one might say) and the chapters short, the constant change of perspective is wearisome and diminishes character development. Also, for a book that is heralded for its plot twists, alert readers can see many of them coming, and there is nothing revealed at the end that will leave us mulling the story in disbelief for days afterward. More likely, the ending is likely to result in a feeling of relief — we’re glad things are resolved so we can move on to a more compelling book.

On the plus side, for a murder mystery, there is very little gore involved, and only a couple of scenes that might be problematic for PETA.

Credit the author for managing to neatly tie up all the loose ends at the close of the novel; she had a destination in mind and gets us there eventually. No doubt some people will consider her a mastermind for navigating such a complicated plot, but it comes at the expense of the reader. C

Frostbite, by Nicola Twilley (Penguin Press, 327 pages)

In 1911, a grand banquet was held in Chicago to showcase an exciting new kind of food.

At the event, put on by the national Poultry, Butter and Egg Association, the five-course meal featured food that had been preserved in cold for six months to a year. The purpose of the event was to prove to a skeptical public that it was safe to eat previously frozen food.

“At the time, suspicion of refrigerated food was widespread,” Nicola Twilley writes in Frostbite, her deep dive into “the vast synthetic winter we’ve built to preserve our food.”

While most of us take refrigeration for granted, just a little more than a century ago it was new technology that didn’t inspire confidence. The 400 diners at that Chicago banquet were considered brave. At the time, gastrointestinal infections were the third leading cause of mortality; people were dying of cheese and ice cream poisoning, and the purveyors of manufactured cold were desperate to convince people that meat and produce that had been stored for months were not only safe, but healthier than fresh food.

It took some time, but they succeeded, and in doing so they revolutionized the American diet. Today there is a largely unseen industry called the “the cold chain,” compromising warehouses, trucks, shipping containers and other apparatus that enable a dizzying array of food choices at supermarkets and restaurants. You may think your own office is too chilly at times, but at companies like Americold and NewCold, workers have to wear specialty clothing in order to endure sub-freezing temperatures during their eight-hour shifts.

In Frostbite, Twilley descends into the chill, donning thermal underwear to work in an Americold warehouse for two weeks and criss-crossing the planet to explore how artificial cold is generated, the mechanics of refrigeration and how the food supply has changed because of it. Amazingly, she manages to make all this all compelling.

She begins with an explanation of how cooling works, a process that seems simple enough now but took decades to develop, with a few tragedies along the way. One was at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, where “the Greatest Refrigerator on Earth” — a five-story cold storage building — attracted admiring crowds until it caught fire, killing 16 people, some of whom jumped to their deaths in front of horrified onlookers.

For the better part of a century, the development of refrigeration was a process marked by trial and error, with multiple entrepreneurs advancing the technology for their own purposes. They included a Trappist monk in France who created the first hermetically sealed compressor because he wanted to cool his wine.

While how a refrigerator works is fairly simple — Twilley travels to Pawtucket, Rhode Island, to watch the construction of a rudimentary one in a garage — it’s not so simple to know exactly how to store food for optimal results and a long life. That involved a long process of trial and error, too.

Apples, for example, remain edible for a year or more when the conditions are right, but fractions of degrees determine whether an apple will rot, and the perfect temperature range changes with the variety of apple. A century of research, however, allows us to buy “fresh” apples at the Market Basket year-round.

“Today, we know more about how to lengthen an apple’s lifespan than a human’s,” Twilley writes.

Which is a good thing, because in Twilley’s telling, harvesting produce sounds practically inhumane. Celery and bananas, for example, don’t immediately die when they are picked, but continue to “breathe” and burn through their own sugars and enzymes “in a desperate attempt to get their cell metabolism going.”

Cold works to preserve the life of produce by slowing the rate of respiration, which is why a green bean you select at the supermarket has typically spent less than two hours in temperatures above 45 degrees, having been rushed from the field to chilling machines and then one of the massive cold-storage facilities.

But the biggest way that refrigeration has altered our eating, and by extension, the planet, is how cold storage has driven the rise of meat consumption. Prior to refrigeration, humans ate only the meat on their farm or their neighbor’s, or animals that were walked to slaughterhouses in cities. Later, animals destined for slaughter were shipped cross-country on box cars, but that was inefficient and costly. It wasn’t until cold storage became widely available that animals themselves were not shipped, but their frozen parts, and this upped the demand for meat, not only because of the accessibility but because freezing improves the texture and taste.

As Twilley writes, “muscle … needs time and cold to ripen into meat.” It also benefits from electric shocks given to the animal carcass, which is information many people might prefer to not know. (“… Shocked beef is brighter red, which consumers prefer.”) Most notably, cold storage gave birth to the factory-farm industry that raises, slaughters and processes animals in numbers that are hard to imagine. To supply our poultry needs alone, Twilley notes that “there are approximately 22.7 billion broiler chickens living out their five-to-seven week spans on Earth at any given moment.”

Twilley takes the slow road to her final chapter, in which she travels to the ultimate frozen warehouse, the “doomsday vault” of seeds kept underground in Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean.

Along the way, she segues into refrigerator-related topics that are much less serious, such as the man who ran a dating service based on what the inside of people’s refrigerators look like. (John Stonehill was very impressed with Twilley’s — seeing photos, he said, “Your fridge is one of the most date-ready fridges I’ve seen in a hell of a long time. Are you married?”). As a writer for The New Yorker and The New York Times magazine, she says she has been “thinking and talking about refrigeration for a decade now,” and it’s hard to imagine that anyone is more well-versed in the topic. While refrigeration isn’t, on the surface, one of the most compelling of conversation topics, it’s a testament to Twilley’s skills as a writer and researcher that she has managed to make this niche subject engrossing. A