Books like Waist-high in the world by Nancy Mairs

Neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi’s poignant memoir chronicles his battle with stage IV metastatic lung cancer and his reflections on life, medicine, and mortality.

An analysis of IQ, genetics, environment, social class, and education in the United States, examining how intelligence test scores reflect both biological and social factors.

At 25, television producer Richard M. Cohen is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and later faces colon cancer, yet he writes a hopeful memoir about resilience, family, and living fully amid chronic illness.

The Bright Hour is a moving memoir in which poet Nina Riggs chronicles her life with terminal breast cancer, exploring how to live fully amid death, illness, and the emotional landscape of being a mother and patient.

In Slave in a Box, M. M. Manring investigates why the troubling figure of Aunt Jemima has endured in American culture. The author traces the evolution of the mammy from her roots in Old South slave reality and mythology, through reinterpretations during Reconstruction and in minstrel shows and turn-of-the-century advertisements, to Aunt Jemima's symbolic role in the Civil Rights movement and her present incarnation as a "working grandmother." The reader learns how advertising entrepreneur James Webb Young, aided by celebrated illustrator N. C. Wyeth, skillfully tapped into nostalgic 1920s perceptions of the South as a culture of white leisure and black labor. Aunt Jemima's ready-mixed products offered middle-class housewives the next best thing to a black servant: a "slave in a box" that conjured up romantic images of not only the food but also the social hierarchy of the plantation South.