** Remember by Lisa Genova

The author of Remember: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting is here to reassure us that occasional memory lapses are entirely normal and not a sign that we are on our way to some dire dementia diagnosis. She also reminds us that forgetting is very helpful, for most things, and that we can use attention, emotion, and other techniques to remember what we actually want to remember.

*** Bottle of Lies by Katherine Eban

Before I read Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom, I thought generic drugs were a great way to contain health care costs and bypass the eye-watering greed of drug companies. In this account, there are enormous holes in the way the FDA oversees the quality of generic-drug manufacturing, especially in foreign countries but even within the US. Even if we set aside ethical concerns about knowingly sending substandard drugs to third-world countries, it’s amazing that the FDA seems unable to employ the most basic best practices to conduct useful inspections: don’t schedule them in advance, go on the production floor, ask workers direct questions. Yes, this is a story of a small set of companies and plants but it poses fundamental questions about regulators.

** Terrible Maps by Michael Howe

I find maps to be a very interesting way of presenting information, and Terrible Maps: Hilarious Maps for a Ridiculous World is a good laugh, full of absurdist examples (rivers in Saudi Arabia, anyone?) and occasionally a map that makes you think (prison population for 100,000 people, for instance) . Overall it’s more a compendium of funny TikTok posts.

** Grading for Equity by Joe Feldman

Written for K-12 teachers and administrators, Grading for Equity: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How It Can Transform Schools and Classrooms proposes a new way to grade, one that’s entirely founded on concept mastery. So no more points for completing homework, class participation, or extra credit. And welcome to a world where students can take and retake tests and turn in assignments when they want. I thought that the author made a strong argument for schools to define coherent grading policies that focus on achievement (and he backs it up with multiple case studies). His justification in favor of unlimited retakes and lax deadlines failed to convince me.

** Equality by Darrin McMahon

Equality: The History of an Elusive Idea describes how the concept of equality has been defined and applied through the ages, focusing mostly on the Western world. From hunter-gatherers to early civilizations, a passel of philosophers, the French revolution, Marxism and Fascism, we see that humans have mostly defined equality as something for the in-group to enjoy, and the in-group can be very small indeed. They’ve also struggled to establish whether equality requires leveling off or allows differences, and if so, how much.

The author is wonderfully erudite and both the concepts and the elaboration of them requires effortful reading.

* The Wager by David Grann

When I was a kid, I was given the standard adventure books for children a la 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and I remember wondering why they were so popular. Sure, they were chock-full of adventures, but I could not really see the point. I had a similar impression with The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder, which describes the extraordinary (true!) adventures of a handful of survivors of the shipwreck of a British naval ship in Patagonia. The story is based on the accounts that three different groups of survivors made to the Royal Navy, years after the wreck. There are lots of corpses, monstrous waves, scheming against the captain. I could not wait for the end.

* Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg

Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection may be useful to those of us who truly have problems communicating, but it’s a little thin. If you want the short version: start by listening to the other person’s perspective and adapt your communication to it. Not worth 307 pages, in my view.

(For a much better book by the same author, I recommend The Power of Habit.)

** Remembering Peasants by Patrick Joyce

Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World describes the lives of European farmers mostly in Ireland (where the author’s family is from), Poland, the Brittany area of France, and Southern Italy, in the 19th and 20th centuries. It’s full of details on how they lived, worked (a lot!), and entertained themselves, and what they believed in–and the general impression is that they led difficult lives with very little economic freedom, and even starvation around the corner. So I found it astounding that the author seems to bemoan the steep decline in the number of the people he insists on calling “peasants”. Perhaps, like members of his own family who emigrated to cities and abroad, they did find much better lives than could have been had in the straightened circumstances they left? Nostalgia has its place, but surely the defeated-looking people in many of the photographs shown in the book would have leapt at the chance of a different life.

** Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg

Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection reads easily and inspires to do better at listening to others–but its message is rather thin (listen carefully). It also is replete with dramatic anecdotes of hostage negotiators and others, typical for self-help books I suppose but rather wearisome for those of us who have ordinary conversations in ordinary contexts.

** Eve by Cat Bohannon

Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution is an ambitious, big book that seeks to explain how specifically female traits developed through the long story of human evolution. It’s well researched and told with a jaunty style (too jaunty sometimes: giving nicknames to various Latin species names seems unnecessary). I thought that the first chapters, which center on basic bodily functions, were very successful. As we progressed through more elusive characteristics, I felt that the author tried a little too hard to picture women as the strong sex. Just give us the facts; we can make our own minds.