Review by New York Times Review
THE TRIALS OF NINA MCCALL: Sex, Surveillance, and mcCalt the Decades-Long Government Plant to Imprison a "Promiscuous" Women, by Scott W. Stern. (Beacon, ? $28.95.) Stern's meticulous history - the first booklength account of an American government "social hygiene" campaign under which thousands of women were forcibly examined, quarantined and incarcerated - is a consistently surprising page-turner. THE BOUNCER, by David Gordon. (Mysterious Press, $26.) A goofy caper novel in the grand tradition of Donald E. Westlake, set among the international crime families of New York. DOPESICK: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America, by Beth Macy. (Little, Brown, $28.) Macy's harrowing account of the opioid epidemic in which hundreds of thousands have already died masterfully interlaces stories of communities in crisis with dark histories of corporate greed and regulatory indifference. AMITY AND PROSPERITY: One Family and the Fracturing of America, by Eliza Griswold. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) This impassioned account of fracking's toll on a small town in Pennsylvania by Griswold, a poet and journalist, lays bare in novelistic detail the human and environmental costs of a practice abetted by greed and government negligence. SPINNING SILVER, by Naomi Növik. (Del Rey, $28.) In her stunning new novel, rich in both ideas and people, Növik gives classic fairy tales - particularly "Rumpelstiltskin" - a fresh, wholly original twist, with the vastness of Tolkien and the empathy and joy in daily life of Le Guin. FLORIDA, by Lauren Groff. (Riverhead, $27.) In the 11 dramatic tales that make up her second story collection, Groff's version of Florida comes with menace, but no less wonder. The author is a careful, sharp recorder of the natural world, and this is restorative fiction for these urgent times. THE PRISON LETTERS OF NELSON MANDELA, edited by Sahm Venter. (Liveright, $35.) This volume of 255 letters, both heartbreaking and inspiring, by the former South African president and civil rights activist, shows his evolution over the course of his long prison sentence into a leader of rare moral courage. CLOCK DANCE, by Anne Tyler. (Knopf, $26.95.) In her latest Baltimore-centric novel, Tyler plunges a staid Arizona retiree into the off-kilter lives of a single mother, her daughter and their rambunctious neighbors. THE HIDDEN STAR, by K. Sello Duiker. (Cassava Republic, $17.95; ages 10 and up.) This captivating posthumous novel is set in a dusty town outside Soweto, South Africa, where magic and danger lurk as a girl discovers a wish-granting stone. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
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