Briefly Noted Book Reviews

Valley of Forgetting, by Jennie Erin Smith (Riverhead). This stunning immersion into decades of Alzheimer’s research in Colombia follows a keen doctor, Francisco Lopera, as he and a team look at an extended family genetically predisposed to contracting the disease young, in their mid-thirties and forties. As Smith closely tracks both the scientists and their subjects, she captures the courage of those who dedicate their own suffering to science in pursuit of a precarious hope. In her handling, flat questions about the ethics of medical research are rendered in rich dimension—including, for example, whether to reveal results to study participants who were found to have the genetic mutation that may cause early-onset Alzheimer’s.

The Lost Orchid, by Sarah Bilston (Harvard). The main character of this wide-ranging history is Cattleya labiata, a purple-and-red orchid from Brazil. In 1818, it was taken to England, where it helped spark a mania for the flowers before seeming to disappear from the wild. Along the way, the orchid became the subject of scientific speculation (including by Charles Darwin), a fetish in the Victorian era’s burgeoning consumer culture, and an example of the excesses of imperialist extraction. Bilston draws on an extensive body of letters, newspapers, and novels to demonstrate how one rare flower could come “to signal wealth and power, or connoisseurship, or modernity, or attachment to the past, or scientific acumen”—sometimes all at once.

Illustration by Ben Hickey

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