In Valley of Forgetting: Alzheimer’s Families and the Search for a Cure, author Jennie Erin Smith is walking a two-way street. The families of mostly poor and working-class Colombians afflicted by a rare neurological condition serve as a narrative framework that allows Smith to tell the technical story of decades of groundbreaking brain research. But the research and the rare condition also serve to introduce the reader—and scientists and journalists around the world—to a multigenerational saga that is a compelling story in itself.

Valley of Forgetting illustrates the lives of families from the hills around Medellin whose parents and cousins succumb to aggressive forms of Alzheimer’s disease, with symptoms first popping up in patients’ 30s and 40s. Doctors and researchers, both from Colombia and abroad, have spent decades trying to learn from the families, in the hopes that this unusual concentration of a rare form of the illness could lead to a cure. The book brings together tales of Big Pharma, academic colonialism, professional jealousy and medical ethics, all with the coincidental backdrop of the epicenter of an international drug war.

It also raises tough-to-answer questions. Should patients at the highest risk for early-onset Alzheimer’s be told of their genetic precondition? Is it moral for those patients to have children, knowing the risk of passing on the genes is high? What does the global medical community owe poor people who participate in clinical trials?

Two elements of the story stand out. First, the dedication with which the Colombian team has obsessively tracked and sought out new families over the course of decades, traipsing through militia-infested rural areas to add to their family trees and find new potential carriers. Second, the devotion of Smith herself, who has spent years inside the homes of both the patients and the researchers, and in exam rooms and other intimate spaces that give the author a stunning level of vivid firsthand detail.

Smith’s bright, crisp portraits of both the studiers and the studied make the various scientific stumbling blocks encountered along the way all the more upsetting. The Alzheimer’s community, after all, had pledged to find a cure by 2025.

With the awareness of neurodivergent symptoms in women and nonbinary people increasing in online discussions, generations of people are coming to better understand themselves and their lives. But many wonder: If autism spectrum disorder is so prevalent in individuals assigned female at birth, where have they been all this time? Gina Rippon’s Off the Spectrum: Why the Science of Autism Has Failed Women and Girls presents a comprehensive exploration of how gender-based scientific bias has systematically erased autistic women from research, diagnosis and, ultimately, care. A cognitive neuroscientist, Rippon unpacks the history of autism studies, exposing how generations of researchers—including herself—have fixated on classifying autism as a “male disorder,” leaving countless people undiagnosed and unsupported.

Off the Spectrum is an incredible resource for anyone looking to learn more about autism, including how it may be classified, signs to look for, historical research on the disorder and ways that over half the world’s population have been left out of the conversation for so long. Both scientifically rigorous and accessible, the book recounts case studies, research from other scientists and testimonies from autistic women, parents and teachers alike. One of the most eye-opening sections explores how parents have been brushed off when they attempt to get autism testing for their daughters. Girls who displayed autistic social symptoms, for example, might be seen as “just shy” or “late bloomers.” Moreover, they are more readily misdiagnosed with anxiety or personality disorders.

Rippon exposes how social attitudes toward gender lead to medical bias and educational barriers, to the detriment of children. Teachers and doctors are often the gatekeepers to autism assessment, and even when boys and girls exhibit identical behaviors, they are often given completely different diagnoses. This leads autistic girls to adapt with camouflaging behaviors, known as masking, to better navigate the world. Rippon also shares interesting gender identity research, with one report noting that autistic people assigned female at birth tend to see gender beyond the binary of conformity; in that study, 26.5 percent of them identified as nonbinary or with another gender identity, leading readers to ponder how the construct of gender could be further evaluated if more study was applied to neurodivergent people.

Ultimately, Off the Spectrum leaves the reader with a hopeful outlook for the future, as awareness of autism beyond men and boys continues to grow. It’s an urgent read, necessary for parents, educators, doctors and, most importantly, autistic women and nonbinary people themselves who may gain solace and a sense of belonging from the text.

John Green’s exceptional combination of memoir, medical history and cultural analysis, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection, reveals how tuberculosis has shaped human culture, and illustrates the ways that we understand and treat the disease, and the steps doctors and researchers have taken to eradicate it.

Green traces the history of tuberculosis and the search for a cure from ancient Greece through the early 21st century. Some ancient philosophers held that TB, or phthisis, was inherited, while others thought the illness was contagious. By the end of the 19th century, the germ theory of the disease prevailed, and scientist Robert Koch discovered a test that would confirm a TB diagnosis in patients. In 1921, scientists developed a vaccine for TB. Still, it is the world’s deadliest disease, killing more than 150 million around the world since the 1950s. One million died of TB in 2023 alone, in large part, Green writes, because “the cure is where the disease is not, and the disease is where the cure is not.” 

Green deftly weaves the story of Henry, a 17-year-old boy with TB whom Green met at a hospital in Sierra Leone in 2019, into his larger narrative. Emaciated from malnourishment and taking a regimen of TB drugs, Henry remains positive, even though his friends and many of his extended family have abandoned him because of the stigma of tuberculosis in Sierra Leone. When Green first meets Henry, the young man’s case looks hopeless because he doesn’t have access to resources that a TB patient elsewhere might have, namely effective drugs, abundant food and clean water. 

“Tuberculosis has come to be seen as a disease of poverty,” writes Green, “an illness that walks the trails of injustice and inequity that we blazed for it.” He briefly shares the history of Sierra Leone, tracing the impacts of colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade to today’s fragile health care system and economic depression. In the end, Henry’s case has a positive outcome, but it illustrates Green’s emphasis throughout the book that the cure for TB is not only in medication but also in allocating resources and health care justly. Everything Is Tuberculosis memorably probes the intersections of medicine and human emotion, while sounding the alarm on this crisis.