Books like My Planet by Mary Roach

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks follows the story of Henrietta Lacks, a poor black tobacco farmer whose cancer cells were taken in 1951 without her consent and later became the first immortal human cell line, HeLa, driving major scientific breakthroughs while raising questions of ethics, race, and medical exploitation.

Mary Roach explores the physical and psychological challenges of space travel, from the lack of gravity and privacy to the quirks of life support systems, all through engaging and often humorous investigations.

Presents a history of humor, from fart jokes on clay Sumerian tablets all the way up to the latest Twitter memes, that tells the story of how comedy came to rule the modern world.

Uses humor to present the negative aspects of the reader's astrological destiny, providing guidance through the darker meanings of the twelve signs and discussing the influence of the signs on such personal topics as temperament, love, sex, and behavior patterns.

In this centennial volume of previously uncollected work, James Thurber continues to flourish. Here is the pleasure of recognizing this comic genius at work again, with his suspicious, civilized, unsettling wit. Included are eighteen prose pieces and over seventy-five drawings by the only cartoonist who could claim to draw "abstract things like despair, disillusion, despondency, sorrow, lapse of memory, exile . . . sometimes in a shape that might be called Man or Woman." Here are drawings with such contemporary smarts that they still sting, including dozens of reports from the front line in that cold war between the sexes. This is Thurber at his most entertaining, praising things canine in two marvelous tributes, musing over the promises of mail sweepstakes, confessing his aversion to anything mechanical, puzzling over the animal kingdom's curious uprisings, reconsidering the value of Byrd's claiming of the icy lands of Antarctica ("Are we landowners or ice dealers? Are we men or penguins?"), and observing the fate of sex. For good measure, Michael Rosen offers the recipe for Thurber's favorite birthday cake, the Never-Fail Devil's Food.