This book is amazing, I am 15 and I read it, my mother at 39 read it, my grandma read it and my younger sister at 13 read it. Everyone takes away some different, but something wonderful from this book. It is absolutely indescribable, you have to read it; right now, order it, read it, it will change your outlook on life.

This is a beautiful book on so many levels. The author's voice, the author's spirit, the author's technique of storytelling are awe inspiring. If you have been led to this page, take it as a sign and order this book, reading it is an experience and I can't wait to read it again. If you are looking for a gift to give someone else then this is it, but read it first yourself so that you can trully share it.

My husband gave this book to me and I am truly enjoying it! Katharine sees things from a rare perspective. Her life transformed her into someone that could see deep into even the most mundane subjects. I feel a new appreciation for even the sounds of crickets! She was certainly a person who's cup was always half full! This book is like welcome raindrops, enveloping you and staying with you long after the drops have evaporated!

I have never read a book of essays from beginning to end but I could not put this one down. It reads like a novel with the depth of an extended poem. Each essay presents a journey into the interior of human heart--an intricate, rocky road through emotions and experiences entirely unique and yet completely understandable. Sometimes I felt like I was looking in the mirror, finding my whole life in a line, on a page. Other times I felt as if I had made a new and very intimate friend.

I chose this book because I have been struggling with a new-found disability and had read that Nancy Mairs had written about her experiences with Multiple Sclerosis in an essay with the gutsy title: "On Being a Cripple." I was delighted to hear Mairs treat this issue with pain and wisdom, and then move on to so many more aspects of her own life story. The writing is exquisite--complex, delicate, and blunt. The stories are gripping accounts of infidelity, depression, suicide, terror, appreciation, parenting, sex, mystery, loneliness, humor, writing, and love. The honesty with which she reveals details about herself and her family is unprecedented. And some sort of affiirmation comes with each gritty revelation, making the irreducible value of human experience once again apparent. Mairs is a feminist, but not in any formulaic manner. Her plea is that women be given the opportunity to explore all of the facets of their own humanity; that being locked in limited roles has caused so many of us to go "mad." Her poignant recollections of younger days are all but universal. Who has not felt different, alienated, self-effacing, and alone at least some time in their life? I cannot imagine anyone not being gripped by the courage and the genius of Mairs' honesty and introspection.

I've read only a few of Mairs' essays from this volume, and the ones I've read are beautifully crafted. Nancy Mairs hates having MS, yet she is not sorry to be a cripple (a term she prefers to handicapped or disabled.) How can this be? Nancy Mairs reveals her life as it is lived day-to-day, as a married, employed, active, wife, mother, and, most importantly, woman and human being. Her style and tone is such that even those unconnected to any kind of disability or disabled person will be profoundly moved by her autobiographical essays.

This collection offers some of the most insightful prose on the topic of selfhood, femininity, coming to terms with body image, religion, chronic illness -- you name it. Nancy Mairs is an Emerson for the nineties. She's never written a dishonest sentence or a boring piece. Read her NOW. Recommend her to your friends. It will change your life.

This book is eloquently written - a fantastic read for a self-help book. And not only that, but it provides realistic guidance and real life examples to allow you to better identify with the concepts. I wish there were more books out from this author!

This book of essays about death is carefully, thoughtfully and sensitively written. As always with Mairs' books, the author shares her personal life, but there are no histironics, no self-pity in this book. Rather she gives us a clear-eyed, deeply felt look at the deaths of key people in her life. I suspect many readers, like me, will identify some of the deaths with ones of loved ones in their own lives, and while this may bring tears, there is a spiritual depth to be found here that is comforting and informative. I believe I have read all of the books written by this author, and I find this one the best written and most satisfying.

Mairs describes finding a writer's voice- reflections of enormous value because she has a prose style to kill for- witty, candid, utterly original, intellucally rigorous. She talks about her lukewarm realationship with the academcy while managing to actually put some extremely murky lit crit to good use Finally she talks about the downside of the writing life -- bad reviews, grants denied-- ''the writer's thin skin and faint heart''. Read this for sensual prose and writerly companionship.

Reviewer: robert dorroh from Sonora, CA United States Nancy Mairs, with devastating honesty, chronicles life as a cripple (her choice of word) in poignant essays in "Waist High in the World."

Beset with multiple sclerosis and bouts with clinical and situational depression, she offsets these stumbling blocks with joy, candor, eloquence, and cultural and political insights. It is a book for everybody, not just the disabled, for it challenges our fears, cultural hangups and citizenship: "The more perspectives that can be brought to bear on human experience, even from the slant of a wheelchair or a hospital bed, or through the ears of a blind person or the fingers of someone who is deaf, the richer that experience becomes." She attacks the stereotype that cripples must be passive and unfailingly polite in a culture that doesn't want to deal with them: "Beyond cheerfulness and patience, people don't expect much of a cripple's character."

Pondering her husband and caretaker George's battle with cancer, she offers a balanced look at suicide in the face of his death. Though she has attempted suicide "more than once," she questions the right-to-die movement, which extolls "rational" suicide: "Since hopelessness is a distinctive symptom of depression, which is an emotional disorder, actions carried out in a despairing state seem to me intrinsically irrational. This last time I clung to shreds of reason, which saved me." Still, she sees suicide as a possibility: "I want to be the one in charge of my life, including its end."

Why should society pay for the misfortunes of others? people ask. Because it's what human beings do: take care of one another, Mairs says, adding that it's the government's role to ensure that its citizens are entitled to the pursuit of happiness. Mairs notes that the abled-bodied should aim to preserve the dignity of the disabled. This takes in seeing them as sexual beings: ... "The general assumption, even among those who might be expected to know better, is that people with disabilities are out of the sexual running."

As a paraplegic, I admire her advocacy on my behalf. I admire her more, however, for her willingness to work toward the betterment of our society through a rare and gifted intelligence.

Nancy Mairs is painfully, startlingly brave. Her book is something I recommend, not just for people with MS but people, period. She reminds me of just how powerful telling the truth can really be. We all need this book!

Nancy Mairs writes about the human condition with humor, compassion, and ruthless honesty. This is a book of personal reflections about disability, embodiment, marriage, religion, and lots of other things, but fundamentally about the possibility of honestly acknowledging all the pain and confusion in our lives and at the same time--within that pain and confusion--living fully, gratefully, joyously.

Wow. What a gift. Thank you, Nancy Mairs.

This book has a variety of recipes that are easy to prepare and use relatively common ingredients. Many vegetarian recipes require exotic ingredients, but most of the recipes in this book use ordinary ingredients, herbs, and spices. Many of the recipes are unusual but all that I've tried have been declicious. The only problem with this paperback edition is that it's very difficult to keep open on the counter while preparing a meal---I have to weight down the pages to use it.

This is my favorite vegetarian cookbook. The recipes are incredibly easy, and they are hearty and satisfying enough for a very cold climate. Plus, you can make them in great big quantities if you like, sometimes all in one pot, so that you can spend less time cooking and more time... EATING! And the recipies are definitely worth relishing. This book has the best nut loaf recipe ever. The one drawback is that it's in the 1970s tradition of vegetarian cooking,which includes alot of dairy and eggs. Some of the recipes are vegan, and those are very tasty and hearty and warming, but in general this is probably not the best book for vegans. I'm noticing that I'm seeing it less & less in bookstores, and I hope they don't quit printing it, because it's great!

I read most of this book in one morning, over coffee-flavored milk and French toast made with wheat bread (it turned out OK). In the new preface in this edition, Nancy Mairs confesses that it's both "the dearest of her books," and also the "gawkiest." Dear but gawky is a good description. I wasn't blown away by the writing, but what I read lingered with me well past the afternoon. The subtitle, "an erotics of place and space," is the book's theme (to use an old-fashioned word). How your physicality (where you live, who you're surrounded by, the erotic charge or condition of your body) affects you psychologically, intellectually, how you, as a woman, can reclaim some of that stuff, is well-modulated. It's the pacing that seems slightly off. It's painful to wade through childhood and early marriage and nervous breakdown (you knew there was going to be one) before we get Nancy Mairs, the writer, in the memoir. Maybe that's unfair to say, since that's how it all unraveled in life, and there are little hints of possibility. But, I dawdled through most of the beginning, and, you get the feeling that this is the stuff that had to be written to make way for other writing. And the whole "erotics of place and space" thing comes across as a little old-fashioned, pre-certain-kinds-of-literary-theory, but that may not matter to you. There are extremely good bits. The chapter, "Inside and Outside," about the nexus of Mairs's rediscovery of herself as a writer with an erotic reawakening is great. This book is very honest and brave, especially about sexual stuff. Her description of those summers on "The Farm," and its lilies and barn cats, and that perfect version of a writer's group that meets on Mondays and swims afterward and has zucchini quiches is an unsulliable interlude, despite the violence that also happens there. You can't help but like reading the writing-of-oneself-into-being. People who like memoirs will undoubtedly be drawn to this book, and gain something from reading it. I give it a friendly, rather than a disparaging, three stars -- I almost would prefer not to quantify it. While it's neither a masterpiece, nor, I suspect, Mairs's best work (I'm ready to read something with keener focus), it's OK, gawky and dear. A little like most of our lives, our own writing.

I believe this book may be a bit miss-classified. Every comment I have read about it makes a reference to "Women's Studies" or feminism. Naaah! She is way too open, too free of the urges to posture and self-censor for that!

In this memoir, Nancy Mairs tells her own story straight up, leaving the gender stereotypes behind. It all reads refreshingly true, with a Yankee voice so clean it begs to be read aloud.

I was first turned on to this book in an undergraduate womens's studies class and I have yet to find another book I feel so passionately about. It's a down to earth, personal memoir of one woman's struggle to find herself. This book portrays the realities of life in the coming of age and the search for your place within the bone house (your dwellings - your body and your home). Any woman can relate to this story and find comfort in its telling. Once discovered, it's a book you'll want to pick up again and again and a book you'll want to share with your closest friends

I purchased this book from ... and then returned it. It wasn't that I felt the recipes were bad, just not imaginative. The author spent many pages on very basic things like things to add to a green salad, but nothing seemed all that diferent or inventive. I was hoping for a few more recipes that showed some unique touches and instead got scaled back basics. In the future I will just make 1/2 of my favorite recipes from other vegetarian cookbooks I own.

This book may be good for a new vegetarian or someone trying to become vegetarian since the smaller recipes let you try different things with fewer leftovers (in case you don't like it!), or for someone who entertains and sometimes has a mixture of veg & non-veg guests. It would allow them to make a separate entree for the veg guests.

This cookbook would be a good buy for someone newly cooking for him or her self - a good gift for a college student. It has a range of easy vegetarian dishes, shopping and vegetable prep tips, and recipes scaled to serve one or two people. It's really a book for the neophyte cook, someone looking to save money, make themselves dinner, and not go to extra trouble or expense.

More experienced folks looking for innovation will likely find it too basic and repetitive. Someone looking for an encyclopedic vegetarian equivalent to "The Joy of Cooking" would do well to seek out Deborah Madison's "Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone."

Since I'm not the greatest cook, I was so excited when I stumbled across this book and found practical recipes that any guy can follow. They are simple and really tasty, with easy-to-follow directions and helpful hints. Plus, the recipes are just the right size for when I'm either eating on my own or entertaining a friend for dinner. This book is a great resource for every kitchen.