Vertosick trained as a neurosurgeon in the era before imaging made the brain visible and writes with the earned frankness of someone who has watched young residents kill patients learning to do necessary things. The chapter on his first solo craniotomy is among the most honest writing about medical training in the literature. He is not confessing failure. He is documenting a system that uses patients as curriculum.

Bugliosi prosecuted Charles Manson and then wrote the definitive account of the case. The horror is not the murders but the mechanism — the complete subordination of individual will that Manson achieved through love bombing, isolation, and repetition. The Family is a case study in how ordinary people become capable of anything.

An elderly British couple travel through post-Arthurian England in a fog of collective amnesia. Ishiguro's question is whether some forgetting is a mercy and what happens when memory returns. The final pages answer the question about the marriage and the question about history simultaneously.