If you aren’t currently among the more than 46 million Americans over the age of 65, with any luck, someday you will be. That’s why geriatric physician Louise Aronson’s Elderhood, a passionate, deeply informed critique of how our healthcare system fails in its treatment of the elderly, is such a vitally important book.

As Aronson explains, American medicine is reluctant to acknowledge old age as a distinct stage of life—one with unique medical challenges but hardly lacking in opportunities for deep fulfillment. Whether it’s the failure, until this year, of pharmaceutical trials to test drugs on elderly subjects, resulting in unanticipated side effects, or the tendency to view the final years of an elderly person’s life only through the lens of illness and disability, our perspective is both shortsighted and flawed. 

Another more profound flaw, Aronson argues, is our medical establishment’s stubborn insistence on treating organs and diseases rather than whole human beings, often prizing science and technology over simple, compassionate care. These efforts typically trigger costly late-life interventions that may be successful in the narrowest sense, prolonging life for a time but often inflicting physical and psychological pain on their recipients that severely compromises their quality of life. Aronson advocates for a new care paradigm, focused on the “optimization of health and well-being,” even when an earlier death may be the consequence. 

Elderhood shares some of its DNA with Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal. But unlike the well-known surgeon, Aronson brings to bear some three decades of geriatric practice, a branch of medicine that didn’t even emerge as a specialty in the U.S. until 1978. She draws extensively on case histories, including moving stories about her father’s final days and her mother’s resilience in facing the challenges of old age. Aronson, who holds a master’s degree in creative writing, is as comfortable drawing on resources outside the field of medicine, quoting poet Donald Hall or novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard, as she is parsing a scientific study. Though the subject of this provocative book is the elderly, its message touches the entire span of human life.

When an admired writer dies, one consolation is that his passing doesn’t necessarily mean the end of his appearance in print. Happily, that’s true of prominent neurologist Oliver Sacks, who’s been gone since 2015. Sacks has left behind Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales, a collection of 34 pieces, some of them previously unpublished—a reminder of the breadth of his professional expertise and the depth of his personal passions.

Admirers of Sacks’ previous books, like The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, will most enjoy the section titled “Clinical Tales.” In these essays, Sacks revisits some of the subjects of the medical case studies for which he’s best known: the way neurological disorders can alter dreams in striking ways, or whether out-of-body and near-death experiences are hallucinations or divine visions.

But Sacks doesn’t confine himself to tinkering with his previous work. “The Catastrophe” sensitively recounts the tragic story of his patient, actor and writer Spalding Gray, who committed suicide some two years after suffering a head injury in a car accident. “Cold Storage” is the bizarre tale of a man Sacks calls “Uncle Toby,” who gradually slipped into a comatose state where he remained, unmoving (and unmoved by his family), for seven years. Sacks offers encouragement in his essay “The Aging Brain,” as well as terror in “Kuru,” a brief survey of diseases collectively known as transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSE), the most familiar of them “mad cow disease.”

Sacks is equally appealing when he turns to more personal topics—including his love for gefilte fish and botanical gardens—which make up the book’s final section, “Life Continues.” This section takes its title from a touching piece he wrote only a short time before his death. In it he decries the “complete disappearance of the old civilities,” displayed daily in the way “a majority of the population is now glued without pause to their phones or other devices.” But Sacks, the quintessential humanist, maintains his optimism, fueled by a belief that “only science, aided by human decency, common sense, farsightedness, and concern for the unfortunate and the poor, offers the world any hope in its present morass.” That aspiration and all the essays collected here are a fitting valedictory to Oliver Sacks’ fascinating life.

The sight of blood makes some people faint; for others, it’s just creepy. Yet it is essential—each adult human contains approximately nine pints of it. In her new book, Nine Pints, Rose George (The Big Necessity) discusses this life-giving substance in intricate detail.

George describes the busy, unrelenting job of this essential human body part that is “a tissue and an organ at once, and probably our most important organ.” She travels around the world, interviewing people whose lives have been impacted by blood in one way or another. She reports on a clinic in South Africa where residents can get tested and treated for HIV, a village in western Nepal where menstruating girls are shunned and must sleep in outdoor shacks, and a London trauma center that regularly treats code red (open chest) and code black (people with severe brain injury) patients.

Integrated in this narrative are a dizzying number of scientific facts and statistics, yet it is all very readable as George applies familiar comparisons. For example, when describing the job of helper T-cells (a type of white blood cell), she writes, “If the immune system were Star Wars, helper Ts would be the Force: they guide other white blood cells to attack invaders and threats.” Her use of statistics, such as the 12,000-mile journey traveled by each person’s red blood cells every day, helps give the reader perspective.

George tackles a squeamish subject in a manner that is eloquent and witty, making Nine Pints a factual, scientific book that reads like a novel with a colorful cast of characters ranging from medicinal leeches to groundbreaking scientists and innovative inventors.

This fascinating book will appeal to anyone interested in learning more about blood and its role as a wondrous, renewable human resource.