Artificial Intelligence, by Melanie Mitchell (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Without shying away from technical details, this survey provides an accessible course in neural networks, computer vision, and natural-language processing, and asks whether the quest to produce an abstracted, general intelligence is worrisome. Although recent advances are staggering, Mitchell emphasizes the limitations of even advanced machines. A program called AlphaGo has bested one of the worlds best Go players, but its intelligence is nontransferable: it cannot think about anything except Go, let alone steal someones job. Mitchells view is a reassuring one: We humans tend to overestimate AI advances and underestimate the complexity of our own intelligence.

The Accusation, by Edward Berenson (Norton). In 1928, after a young girl went missing in the town of Massena, New York, the towns Jews were accused of killing her, a theory that became the focus of the police investigation. This was the first and only time that the so-called blood libel, which flourished in medieval Europe, gained traction in the United States. Berenson, a historian whose great-grandparents were among the first Jews to live in Massena, explores the origins of the blood libel and traces its circuitous route to upstate New York. He shows how the particular contours of racism at the time allowed this long-buried idea to surface, and describes the ensuing debate among American Jews over the challenge of claiming a place in their new home.

Frankissstein, by Jeanette Winterson (Grove). This novelistic homage to Frankenstein weaves together the life of its author, Mary Shelley, and a merrily slapstick plot set in the present. While Mary, on the shores of Lake Geneva, in 1816, imagines a man whose desire to seize the divine power of creation unleashes a monster, a transgender doctor named Ry (formerly Mary) falls under the spell of a Gospel Channel scientist with a secret laboratory, where they are joined by a sex-toy entrepreneur, an evangelical Christian, and a scoop-hungry journalist. Refracting the past through the present, Winterson links automation, A.I., cryonics, and sexbots to the human yearning to transcend the aging, mortal bodies that we are born into.

Red at the Bone, by Jacqueline Woodson (Riverhead). Anatomizing the consequences of an accidental pregnancy, this multivocal novel uses the sweet-sixteen celebration of the resulting child, Melody, as its centerpiece. Gradually, Melodys perspective, and those of her parents and grandparents, map the pressures surrounding her birthher fathers upbringing as the child of a single mother and the class tensions the pregnancy unleashes in her mothers family, members of the black lite. Melodys mother leaves her behind to attend Oberlin and conceals her motherhood from her new friends, straining the parental relationship. The novel subtly explores the ways in which desire can reconfigure our best-laid plans, and its expansive outlook suggests how easily, in African-American life, hard-won privileges can be dissolved.

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Briefly Noted Book Reviews - The New Yorker

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