CONTENTS

Publisher’s Note ...... vii Complete Annotated List of Titles ...... ix Contributing Reviewers ...... xxxi

13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl—Mona Awad ...... 1

The Age of Genius: The Seventeenth Century and the Birth of the Modern Mind—A. C. Grayling ...... 5 All That Man Is—David Szalay ...... 10 All the Birds in the Sky—Charlie Jane Anders ...... 14 All Tomorrow’s Parties—Rob Spillman ...... 18 American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst—Jeff rey Toobin ...... 22 American Housewife—Helen Ellis ...... 27 Another Brooklyn—Jacqueline Woodson ...... 32 The Arab of the Future 2: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1984–1985— Riad Sattouf ...... 36 Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?—Frans de Waal . . . 40 At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, , , , , , Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others—Sarah Bakewell . . . 45

Barkskins—Annie Proulx ...... 50 Before the Fall—Noah Hawley ...... 55 Behold the Dreamers—Imbolo Mbue ...... 59 The Black Calhouns: From Civil War to Civil Rights with One African American Family—Gail Lumet Buckley ...... 64 Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary—Joe Jackson ...... 69 The Black Widow—Daniel Silva ...... 74 Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America—Patrick Phillips ...... 78 Blood Brothers: The Fatal Friendship between Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X— Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith ...... 82 Breaking Wild—Diane Les Becquets ...... 87 But What If We’re Wrong?: Thinking about the Present As If It Were the Past—Chuck Klosterman ...... 92 By Gaslight—Steven Price ...... 97

The Cabaret of Plants: Forty Thousand Years of Plant Life and the Human Imagination—Richard Mabey ...... 102 City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York— Tyler Anbinder ...... 106 The City of Mirrors—Justin Cronin ...... 111

iii MAGILL’S LITERARY ANNUAL 2017 Collected Poems: 1950–2012—Adrienne Rich ...... 115 Collected Poems: 1974–2004—Rita Dove ...... 120 Commonwealth—Ann Patchett ...... 125 Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind over Body—Jo Marchant ...... 129

Dodgers—Bill Beverly ...... 134 The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror—Joyce Carol Oates ...... 138 A Doubter’s Almanac—Ethan Canin ...... 142

End of Watch—Stephen King ...... 147 Everybody’s Fool—Richard Russo ...... 151 Evicted: Poverty and Profi t in the American City—Matthew Desmond . . . . . 155 Exposure—Helen Dunmore ...... 160

Fallen Land—Taylor Brown...... 164 The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race—Jesmyn Ward . . . 169 The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice—Patricia Bell-Scott . . . . . 173 The Fireman—Joe Hill ...... 178 Fool Me Once—Harlan Coben ...... 182 A Friend of Mr. Lincoln—Stephen Harrigan ...... 186

The Gene: An Intimate History—Siddhartha Mukherjee ...... 191 The General vs. the President: MacArthur and Truman at the Brink of Nuclear War—H. W. Brands ...... 196 The Girls—Emma Cline ...... 201 The Glamour of Strangeness: Artists and the Last Age of the Exotic— Jamie James ...... 205 The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars—Dava Sobel ...... 210 Grace—Natashia Deón ...... 215 A Great Reckoning—Louise Penny ...... 219 Grief Is the Thing with Feathers—Max Porter ...... 224 Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War—Mary Roach ...... 228

Hag-Seed—Margaret Atwood ...... 233 Here I Am—Jonathan Safran Foer ...... 238 Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape and the Making of Winston Churchill—Candice Millard ...... 243 Heroes of the Frontier—Dave Eggers ...... 248 The High Mountains of Portugal—Yann Martel ...... 252 Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis—J. D. Vance . . . 256 His Bloody Project: Documents Relating to the Case of Roderick Macrae— Graeme Macrae Burnet ...... 260

iv CONTENTS Homegoing—Yaa Gyasi ...... 264 Hot Milk—Deborah Levy ...... 268 Hystopia—David Means ...... 272

I Almost Forgot About You—Terry McMillan ...... 277 I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes within Us and a Grander View of Life— Ed Yong ...... 281 I’m Thinking of Ending Things—Iain Reid ...... 286 Imagine Me Gone—Adam Haslett ...... 290 In a Diff erent Key: The Story of Autism—John Donvan and Caren Zucker . . . 294 In Other Words—Jhumpa Lahiri ...... 299 In the Darkroom—Susan Faludi ...... 304 Indelible Ink: The Trials of John Peter Zenger and the Birth of America’s Free Press—Richard Kluger ...... 308 Irena’s Children: The Extraordinary Story of the Woman Who Saved 2,500 Children from the Warsaw Ghetto—Tilar J. Mazzeo ...... 313

Jane Steele—Lyndsay Faye ...... 318 Jean Cocteau: A Life—Claude Arnaud ...... 322 Jerusalem—Alan Moore ...... 327

Kill ’Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul— James McBride ...... 332

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