Rating: 
Summary: A Work of Astonishing Fiction
Review: Andrea Barrett has done it again. This collection of short stories has all the characteristics that placed Ship Fever and Voyage of the Narwhale among the most accomplished fictions of our time. The lucid and lovely prose, the ruthless honesty, the shocking psychological insight, compassion and deep research of the earlier works is here, but Ms Barrett continues to grow as a writer. These new stories are her most assured, most daring and most wonderfully realized yet. I have followed Ms Barrett's fiction from Lucid Stars, her first novel, to Servants of the Map with growing admiration and wonder. She is a major talent and this is a lovely book.
Rating:
Summary: A Work of Astonishing Fiction
Review: Andrea Barrett has done it again. This collection of short stories has all the characteristics that placed Ship Fever and Voyage of the Narwhale among the most accomplished fictions of our time. The lucid and lovely prose, the ruthless honesty, the shocking psychological insight, compassion and deep research of the earlier works is here, but Ms Barrett continues to grow as a writer. These new stories are her most assured, most daring and most wonderfully realized yet. I have followed Ms Barrett's fiction from Lucid Stars, her first novel, to Servants of the Map with growing admiration and wonder. She is a major talent and this is a lovely book.
Rating: 
Summary: Wonderful storytelling, but...........
Review: Andrea Barrett's Servants of the Map is a wonderful story collection, a collection with tremendous depth and imagination. Barrett's stories are all richly told and engrossing, each giving us their own world. What is remarkable about her stories, and what sets this collection off from most others out today is her focus on the scientific world. This focus adds an additional layer to the stories and makes them somehow richer. The stories involve a 19th century map-maker, a 21st century science professor and early 20th century tuberculosis sufferers. Barrett does not shy away from the scientific nature of her characters and their stories and because of this, these stories have additional layers of meaning. These are terrific stories. Pick them up.
Rating:
Summary: Fabulous Stories
Review: Andrea Barrett's Servants of the Map is a wonderful story collection, a collection with tremendous depth and imagination. Barrett's stories are all richly told and engrossing, each giving us their own world. What is remarkable about her stories, and what sets this collection off from most others out today is her focus on the scientific world. This focus adds an additional layer to the stories and makes them somehow richer. The stories involve a 19th century map-maker, a 21st century science professor and early 20th century tuberculosis sufferers. Barrett does not shy away from the scientific nature of her characters and their stories and because of this, these stories have additional layers of meaning. These are terrific stories. Pick them up.
Rating:
Summary: Wonderous
Review: I discovered Andrea Barrett when I read Voyage of the Narwhal, an epic story of courage, devotion, and the struggle with the northern latitudes that captured so many imaginations during the 19th century. I enjoyed that book tremendously. I wasn't disappointed in this collection of short stories.
Andrea Barrett has a great ability when it comes to developing characters. From Max Vigne, a hard working member of a mapping expedition in the area of Northern India in the title story, Servant of the Map" to his wife Clara that makes a major appearance in the final story "The Cure", all her characters are real. Almost real enough, it seems, to reach out and touch.
Each story stands on its own. But the way Ms Barrett weaves the stories together if fabulous. The final story, by the way, is connected to her book, Voyage of the Narwhal. Ned Kynd, an inn keeper in the "The Cure" played a major role in the novel.
I think readers appreciate these connections with past reads. It shows that the author respects the intelligence of the reader and isn't afraid to say that perhaps that story wasn't quite finished.
Finally, Barrett is a wonderful story teller. One can read along in any of these stories and almost take for granted what one is reading. Then all of a sudden a major twist in the story, or some new development with the character, or a connection with something you've read before.
Read this book.
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful storytelling, but...........
Review: No doubt, these finely crafted, interwoven stories will delight many readers, but.... If you're considering this collection because you loved the adventure and danger of Voyage of the Narwhal, reconsider. These stories are as quiet and subtle as Voyage is exciting.
Rating:
Summary: Erudite, poetic, deeply enriching stories
Review: SERVANTS OF THE MAP is a unique collection of short stories by the redoubtable Andrea Barrett. While most of us felt she needed the space and stretched-canvas-epic-form to weave her magic, in this collection of six shortish stories she proves she is as adept at relating her tales woven equally with Apollonian/scientific and Dionysian/sensual facets in tight, capsular fashion. She still manages to create vistas rather than views and lineages rather than one dimensional lifetimes. Now and then I find it necessary to break out of her luxuriously poetic language and take a laudatory appraisal of this women's depth of scientific information. The research for such diverse stories pays off by giving the reader the pleasure of discovery of cartography, botany, medical diseases etc in a flowing, painless entry to the richly detailed minds of her characters. This is nothing short of a wondrous book, on to be revisited often - one story at a time - like a treasured scrapbook travelogue!
Rating:
Summary: Erudite, poetic, deeply enriching stories
Review: SERVANTS OF THE MAP is a unique collection of short stories by the redoubtable Andrea Barrett. While most of us felt she needed the space and stretched-canvas-epic-form to weave her magic, in this collection of six shortish stories she proves she is as adept at relating her tales woven equally with Apollonian/scientific and Dionysian/sensual facets in tight, capsular fashion. She still manages to create vistas rather than views and lineages rather than one dimensional lifetimes. Now and then I find it necessary to break out of her luxuriously poetic language and take a laudatory appraisal of this women's depth of scientific information. The research for such diverse stories pays off by giving the reader the pleasure of discovery of cartography, botany, medical diseases etc in a flowing, painless entry to the richly detailed minds of her characters. This is nothing short of a wondrous book, on to be revisited often - one story at a time - like a treasured scrapbook travelogue!
Rating:
Summary: Wonderous world
Review: Sometimes there are different degrees of good. For Servants of the Map, five stars doesn't seem to do it justice. In fact, using any sort of rating system doesn't feel right. This collection of stories is as fresh and clean as the outdoor worlds it so amazingly describes. Often, I found my mind wandering off the page, and rather than stop myself and turn back to the book, I let my thoughts linger on. The book is nostalgic in this way. It reads quietly and naturally. I felt myself living in Andrea Barrett's vivid landscapes, and communicating with her eccentrically human characters. How rarley in a book do you find two characters, both very likeable, dislike each other? Yet, how often do we find this in real life?
In the second story, The Forest, as well as its companion, The Mysteries of Ubiquitin, opposing characters are quietly clashing almost all the time. Imagine two people, polar opposites, totally disgrunteled with each other, sitting comfortably on a patio near a swimming pool. I can not recommend this book more emphatically. For those of you who are scared of short stories... stop, and read this book. In those blank spaces between the stories, a larger more wonderous world is created than in most novels I've recently read, including those busting over the 1000 page barrier. This one, you'll want to reread simply to give your imagination another Andrea Barret boost!
Rating:
Summary: Meditation on a worthwhile life
Review: Spanning 200 years, the stories of Servants of the Map, address issues of personal discovery against a backdrop of the scientific and natural world. Barrett is strongest with her historical settings, where time moves more slowly and there is more solitary introspection. We can better hear the poetic expression of quietly falling snow or the wind in the trees. Yet the strongest statement the book makes, including the contemporary stories, is the almost invisible thread that binds the characters to each other and to history. Diaries, letters, old notebooks, and old memories amplify the connections. Whether it is Max , the 1861 surveyor of the Himalayas or his wife Clara many years later in another story in America, two sisters with two different lives in two different stories, and the same for a separated brother and sister, the search for identity and the yearning for a life that matters and that is authentic is universal. Nor does Barrett stop there. For example, the last story, The Cure, brings back Nora from the haunting title story of her last collection, Ship Fever, and also refers obliquely to characters from her novel, The Voyage of the Narwhal. This new collection is an eloquent companion to those earlier works. After reading the stories, you feel like you have shared in a personal meditation with these characters.
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