"Stephen Heywood was twenty-nine years old when he learned that he was dying of ALS - Lou Gehrig's disease. Almost overnight his older brother, Jamie, turned himself into a genetic engineer in a quixotic race to cure the incurable. His Brother's Keeper is a powerful account of their story, as they travel together to the edge of medicine." "The book brings home for all of us the hopes and fears of the new biology. In this narrative, Jonathan Weiner gives us a portrait of science and medicine today. We learn about gene therapy, stem cells, brain vaccines, and other novel treatments for such nerve-death diseases as ALS, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's - diseases that afflict millions, and touch the lives of many more." It turns out that the author has a personal stake in the story as well. When he met the Heywood brothers, his own mother was dying of a rare nerve-death disease. The Heywoods' gene therapist offered to try to save her, too.

On the surface, David Baddiel's childhood was fairly standard: a lower-middle-class Jewish family living in an ordinary house in Dollis Hill, north-west London. But David came to realise that his mother was in fact not ordinary at all. Having escaped extermination by fleeing Nazi Germany as a child, she was desperate to make her life count, which took the form of a passionate, decades-long affair with a golfing memorabilia salesman. Meanwhile, as Baddiel investigates his family's past, his father's memories are fading; dementia is making him moodier and more disinhibited, with an even greater penchant for obscenity. As with his mother's affair, there is both comedy and poignancy to be found: laughter is a constant presence, capable of transforming the darkest of experiences into something redemptive.