This week I'm reading The Map Book. Not ANY map book. THE MAP BOOK. This great big lump of gorgeous paper lives up to the implied prestige of its hugely capitalized title.

It's "a celebration of the map in its myriad forms over time" and an attempt to understand "why they came into being, who their creators were, what purposes they were intended to serve."

The Map Book surveys the history of mapmaking in chronological format and teaches you something about civilization, history, beauty and art. Even the National Geographic has not created a survey book quite like this one.

Head of Map Collections at the British Library, Peter Barber edited the massive book to make it accessible to cartographically challenged readers. He included sufficient esoterica and sheer beauty so you may share his awe and excitement at these wonderful objects.

The very first map in the book is dated from 1500 BC. It's the oldest known plan of an inhabited site, a Bronze age rock art inscription from the valley of Camonica in the alpine foothills of northern Italy. Barber calls these glyphs "Fossilized Prayers... a record of the prayers of non-literate peoples."

These markings on a glacially smoothed cave wall are a palimpsest, in which "different episodes of a prayer, possibly separated by hundreds of years, have left a succession of rectangles, irregular lines and dots and, on top of all, outlines of timber-framed houses." This map, or prayer, was created over a period of at least 800 years. Wow.

Maps "can be regarded as the most successful pieces of fiction ever to be created," Barber says. "For many map enthusiasts the fascination of maps ironically stems from their necessary lack of truth."

"Given the impossibility of representing the total reality, with all its complexity, on a flat surface... hard decisions have to be taken as to what features to select for accurate representation or indeed for representation at all.

"Such features as motorways will be shown far larger than they actually are because they are important to drivers... maps will show things that cannot actually be seen in the real world, such as relative financial wealth, or the geology far beneath the ground."

The first ten maps take us from rock art only to the late Romans. From that page forward are several hundred maps and two thousand years still to traverse.

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I want to give you a heads-up on two books coming into print later this year. The one I'm reading now in galley form is The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan.

The omnivore's dilemma is that humans, like rats, can eat everything, and often do.

Intelligence, memory and much of our culture deals with the question "What to have for dinner?" Red berries: sweet and tasty, green berries: tart and poisonous. Memory says "Isn't that the mushroom that made me sick last week?" Culture gives that mushroom a name, Death Cap, that we can recognize and act upon. Run!

You are what you eat, and we are corn walking. "There are some 45,000 items in the average American supermarket, and more than a quarter of them now contain corn."

Industrial corn production has gradually driven livestock, orchards, other grains, and most people from the vast cornfields of Iowa. Are we cultivating corn, or being cultivated by it?

Another breakthrough book on food will be Marion Nestle's What to Eat coming in May. Nestle has become a scourge of the food industry for outspoken advocacy of simple, organic foods, and her startling deconstructions of food labels and questionable food-industry sponsored studies.

You don't have to wait for publication. Catch up with Marion Nestle's work in her current paperback, Food Politics.

Nestle and Pollan teach and lecture at UC Berkeley. We'll be hearing a lot from them in the next few months.

Aired Sunday March 19, 2006 at 10:55 am and Monday March 20, 2006 at 8:40 am

Orders/Information:

The Map Book edited by Peter Barber. Walker & Company hardcover $45. ISBN 0802714749.

Information on the rock art of northern Italy: http://www.europreart.net/orme2.htm

The Omnivore's Dilemma, A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan. Penguin Press hardcover due April, 2006. Hardcover $26.95. ISBN 1594200823.

What to Eat by Marion Nestle. North Point Press hardcover $30. ISBN 0865477043. To be published in May, 2006.

Read about Marion Nestle and Michael Pollan in the March 15, 2006, Food section of the San Francisco Chronicle: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/2006/03/15/FDG4CHHIR61.DTL