Since you poked the question of how people die the other week, The Emperor of All Maladies (2011) is a pretty widely acclaimed book on cancer. I personally liked Natural Obsessions (1999), but it's more from the lab researcher's point of view, and a little bit dated now.
Nothing wrong with dated. Second Self was written in 1984 and the insights it has into human-computer interaction are not only fresh, they're new simply because they're now foreign. My favorite book on the NRO, Deep Black, was written in 1986 when the NRO didn't officially exist. I read it with Wikipedia open to compare the conjecture in the book with the realities that have since been declassified. It teaches you your blind spots. I also have a book on the Soviet space program written in 1987. Read that one with Wiki open? Holy fuck. Talk about a learning experience. The best books are the ones you can enjoy from many perspectives.
What's foreign is reading the book and afterwards visiting the places mentioned. They talk in it about when the Whitehead institute was constructed at MIT. I got to visit yesterday and it's a dwarf compared to the following institute they put up right next door. Weird, too, seeing the river next to the campus, knowing that a researcher took their life walking across the ice because they had been screwed one too many times by academia... If you want a pitch, it's a book on the process of cancer research written by an anthropologist, an outsider (but accurate) perspective on how lab scientists navigate the waters of funding, politics, and actual scientific problems and the many characters that pop up along the way.