MAPS TO ANYWHERE is a verbal color chart. Its essays are colorful, idiomatically rendered sketches based on recalled impressions and incidents. Variation, rather than traditional narrative, is the unifying principle Cooper uses to construct his book. It is likely that Cooper himself would approve of this analogy. He refers several times, in passing, to his boyhood interest in architecture. Landscapes and building of every variety appear in each selection. They constitute exponents which give coherence to a multiplicity of subjects. They unify impressions which are as heterogeneous as the California settings he describes.

The collection has eight primary “colors,” verbal “movements” within which Cooper groups short variations or changed perspectives on the major experience. “Beacons Burning Down” is, for example, a phrase retained from an unsatisfying play the author once attended. Cooper salvages the phrase to describe the essential loss which characterizes living. Often such losses are trivial, a missed opportunity to answer a radio quiz question correctly. Sometimes, as in the “Atlantis” section, they encompass whole continents of environment: Nick the barber, who never leaves his shop; Herbert Morris, whose emotional reporting of the Hindenburg disaster resulted in his being fire. In one of the essays Beacons Burning, it gets its title from an unsatisfying play the author attended. It talks about unsatisfying things like how he had fourteen siblings, and his name will always be called last.