1 BEING MORTAL by Atul Gawande. Metropolitan/ Holt. The surgeon and New Yorker writer considers how doctors fail patients at the end of life, and how they can do better.

2 THE INNOVATORS by Walter Isaacson. Simon & Schuster. Studies of the people who created computers and the Internet, beginning in the 1840s.

3 THE HOT ZONE by Richard Preston. Anchor. The discovery of the Ebola virus, and the efforts to keep it from spreading; first published in 1994.

4 WHAT IF? by Randall Munroe. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Scientific (but often humorous) answers to hypothetical questions, based in part on the author’s website, xkcd.com. (1)