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. (Last month’s ranking: 1)

2 David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell. Little, Brown. How disadvantages work in our favor, from the author of “The Tipping Point” and “Outliers.”

3 What If? by Randall Munroe. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Scientific, often humorous answers to hypothetical questions, derived in part on the author’s website, xkcd.com. (3)

4 The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee. Scribner/Simon & Schuster. An oncologist’s history of cancer and its treatment covers both the eureka moments and the decades of despair.