CHASING MY CURE: A Doctor's Race to Turn Hope into Action by David Fajgenbaum (Ballantine).

THE SOUL OF CARE The Moral Education of a Husband and a Doctor by Arthur Kleinman (Viking).

Two doctors' distinctly different but equally powerful, sensitively and strongly written memoirs have just been published within a few days of each other. Both of these men are gifted but also privileged, stars of their little worlds in their different ways, and yet each maintains, with unmistakable, deeply felt clarity, that one great after-effect of their very different triumphs was humility before what makes us all human.

Fajgenbaum (he has an MBA alongside the expected pre-med and medical degrees, and was a star athlete in college, too) was at the beginning of his life and career when he was diagnosed with a rare disease that was certain to kill him, and soon. And indeed came hair-raisingly close (hair-raising even just in the reading). Some might have found that demoralizing, but Fajgenbaum seized it by the scruff of the neck while actually on what everyone knew was his death bed, shook it relentlessly but creatively, applying not only his training but off-beat methods such as crowdsourcing the research, and so taught researchers some new ways to think. That disease won't be an automatic death sentence for anyone, ever again.

Kleinman, a psychiatrist and social anthropologist, was well into middle age and at the height of a brilliant career, thanks in good part to the devoted support of his equally gifted wife, when she began to show clear signs of early-onset Alzheimer's. He was able to sustain his professional standing (as few of us could, of course), lightening his professional obligations to serve his wife as her caretaker for the last ten years of their life together. His story of that decade, especially, is sensitively told and makes real both the desolation and the richness of that relationship. Which inspired in Kleinman depth of feeling to be sure, but also depth of thought, about medical care in this age of ever longer lifetimes, including of those without his material resources.

THE TYRANNY OF VIRTUE by Robert Boyers (Scribner). Well, yes, another book of opinions by a very good writer; serious, too, and thoughtful, but not so life-and-death. "Virtue" is his word, but what he's talking about is self-righteousness and hypersensitivity—that business, on campuses especially (so we hear), of identity, privilege, “triggering,” freedom of speech. But it is thoughtful—not just snotty “populist” outrage over spoiled-brat collegians.

BOMBER'S MOON by Archer Mayor (Minotaur). The new Joe Gunther Vermont novel, of course; a little more intricate than usual and with more crimefighters, technicians and the like, than we've met before, and maybe even a couple more plot twists than usual. But solid and fine-grained as New England oak straight through, as always.