Reviews of notable new fiction and nonfiction.  Foreign Bodies, by Simon Schama (Ecco). This absorbing cultural history of vaccines surveys three centuries of controversy, beginning in England in the seventeen-twenties, with the first smallpox inoculation. For every enlightened champion of them—such as Voltaire, who praised the “strong and solid good sense” of their use—there were countless skeptics, reactionaries, and unscrupulous politicians who resisted them. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. In the Shadow of Quetzalcoatl, by Merilee Grindle (Harvard). This vibrant biography follows the complex, captivating figure of Zelia Nuttall, a self-taught scholar of ancient Mesoamerica and a pioneer of modern anthropology. Nuttall rose to national fame in 1893, when her decoding of the Aztec calendar stone was featured at the Chicago World’s Fair. She went on to publish prolifically and to become one of the chief collectors of indigenous artifacts for numerous American museums. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. Holler, Child, by LaToya Watkins (Tiny Reparations). In this début short-story collection, a varied group of voices—male and female, young and old, parent and child—grapple with profound disruptions, from infidelity to illness. Among Watkins’s characters are a woman entertaining a string of reporters curious about her son, who was a cult leader, and a recent widow, who confronts her mother for raising her to be “too hard to live soft.” Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. Night Watch, by Jayne Anne Phillips (Knopf). Opening nearly a decade after the Civil War, this intricately plotted novel takes place at a progressive psychiatric hospital in West Virginia. At the story’s outset, a mute woman and her teen-age daughter are brought to the hospital by an abusive drifter who took over the farm on which they lived; gradually, the book begins to reveal events that took place ten years earlier, imbuing the more recent story line with tragic and surprising meaning. Buy now on Amazon or Bookshop. What are you reading this week? Reply to let us know. | 
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