Full name: Waist-High in the World: A Life Among the Nondisabled

Author: Nancy Mairs Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Purchase/reserch links: LibraryThing Amazon Goodreads ISBNs: 9780807070871 0807070874

Everyone: read this book. It takes an ice-pick to the disability tropes that many of us carry about.Mairs is a brilliant essayist and memoirist, writing about her own experiences as a woman with MS, who has lost movement in two legs and one arm and lives in the Southwest. She weaves larger themes on disability studies into her narrative, making this book a lot more accessible to general readers than academic disability-studies books. My favorite moments include:-Her claim to ethics -- Mairs is a Catholic Worker and insists on the requirement that she continue doing 'good works,' even as she's treated as a service project herself.-Her frank discussion on disability and sexuality (in which she jokes she nearly titled the book "Cock-High in the World").-Nuanced discussion of euthanasia and abortion of fetuses with disabilities.-Re-casting of 'western writing' to include the perspectives of disabled western authors.-All the wit and humor and richness of Mairs' writing. Seriously: read this!