The best book about artificial intelligence of the past few years is, on its face, not about artificial intelligence at all. Max Bennett's A Brief History of Intelligence is a history of brains: how a lightless world of drifting cells produced steering worms, then learning fish, then imagining mammals, then scheming primates, and finally a talking ape that writes books about the process. Bennett's wager is that this four-billion-year engineering log is the single most useful document anyone building intelligent machines can read, because evolution already solved the problems AI researchers are stuck on, and left its working notes inside our skulls.