Jennie Erin Smith's Valley of Forgetting: Alzheimer’s Families and the Search for a Cure …follows the largest known kindred with a genetic form of early-onset Alzheimer's. Smith traces not only a medical mystery but a slow remaking of a community into a research site. The families she accompanies do not merely "participate" in trials; their lives are increasingly organized around the needs of clinicians, pharmaceutical companies, and global neurologists. The book asks, with unusual patience, whose reasons continue to matter when the cure becomes the overriding narrative.