In “The King’s Best Highway’’ (Scribner, $27.50) Eric Jaffe has performed a valiant rescue of the scattered stories of the Boston Post Road, which he boldly calls “the route that made America.’’ The original, of course, is really two main routes between Boston and New York — one that follows the coast and another that heads due west to Springfield, then follows the Connecticut River to the coast. In writing about either fork, Jaffe can send shivers down a reader’s neck by evoking the early years when the post road was little more than a barely beaten wilderness path.

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