This book is a true story of a single mom who, by the grace of God, became a certified registered nurse anesthetist. After many trials and tribulations, she has learned how to forgive and move on to become the woman God wants her to be.

This is a timely collection exploring the politics of female celebrity across a range of contemporary, historical, media and national contexts. "In the Limelight and Under the Microscope" is a timely collection exploring the politics of female celebrity across a range of contemporary, historical, media and national contexts. Amidst concerns about the apparent 'decline' in the currency of modern fame ('famous for being famous'), as well as debates about the shifting parameters of public/private visibility, it is female celebrities who are positioned as the most active discursive terrain. This collection seeks to interrogate such phenomena by forging a greater conceptual, theoretical and historical dialogue between celebrity studies and critical gender studies. It takes as its starting point the understanding that female celebrity is a particularly fraught cultural phenomenon with ideological and industrial implications that warrant careful scrutiny. In moving across case studies from the 19th century to the present day, this book works from the assumption that the case study should play a crucial role in generating debate about the dialogue between 'past' and 'present', and the individual essays will seek to reflect this spirit of enquiry.

Western culture has long regarded black female sexuality with a strange mix of fascination and condemnation, associating it with everything from desirability, hypersexuality, and liberation to vulgarity, recklessness, and disease. Yet even as their bodies and sexualities have been the subject of countless public discourses, black women's voices have been largely marginalized in these discussions. In this groundbreaking collection, feminist scholars from across the academy come together to correct this omission--illuminating black female sexual desires marked by agency and empowerment, as well as pleasure and pain, to reveal the ways black women regulate their sexual lives.
The twelve original essays in "Black Female Sexualities" reveal the diverse ways black women perceive, experience, and represent sexuality. The contributors highlight the range of tactics that black women use to express their sexual desires and identities. Yet they do not shy away from exploring the complex ways in which black women negotiate the more traumatic aspects of sexuality and grapple with the legacy of negative stereotypes.
"Black Female Sexualities" takes not only an interdisciplinary approach--drawing from critical race theory, sociology, and performance studies--but also an intergenerational one, in conversation with the foremothers of black feminist studies. In addition, it explores a diverse archive of representations, covering everything from blues to hip-hop, from "Crash "to "Precious," from Sister Souljah to Edwidge Danticat. Revealing that black female sexuality is anything but a black-and-white issue, this collection demonstrates how to appreciate a whole spectrum of subjectivities, experiences, and desires.

The precious life of Saint Mary Magdalene includes her time spent with Jesus Christ before, during, and after his murderous death by the Roman soldiers and manipulated Jews. Mary Magdalene was the first person Jesus approached and spoke to after he rose from the dead. The most beautiful and sacred story ever written. Saint Mary Magdalene was a misunderstood, lost, but true hearted and dedicated soul. This lost and forgotten book has been resurrected in keeping the exact wording, spelling, punctuation, and format of the original source written in the year 1860. Grace your brain and bookshelf and preserve this story. Reverend Thomas S. Preston (1824-1891) was a Roman Catholic Vicar-General of New York, prothonotary Apostolic, chancellor, author, preacher, and administrator. All monetary profit, if any, derived from this book will be joyfully given, by R. Sirius Kname, to the church in deserving.

Tornado warnings were posted in Canton, Ohio, on the night of author Cherie Kirby Hill Wren's birth in 1943. The storm was just a normal occurrence, but she can't help think it was a precursor of her life to come.

In "Speed Bumps and Angels, " Wren recaps the storms and speed bumps she has experienced in her life: nearly drowning when she was just two years old; being hit by a car; getting jilted, twice; running away from home and marrying a man who was abusive and ultimately tried to kill her; developing type 2 diabetes; being diagnosed with benign essential blepharospasm; having her mitral and aortic valves replaced; gaining a pacemaker; and enduring pulmonary hypertension.

In this memoir, Wren shows how these bumps served their purpose. First, they slowed her down so she didn't run out of control. Second, they gave her a little jolt, sometimes back to reality. Third, they kept her from getting too complacent. She shows that by conquering challenges, we grow and learn. We are here for a purpose, and by living each day to the fullest we can, knowingly or unknowingly, accomplish that purpose.

Epsilon Phi Omega Chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporated, has a long and distinguished history of which we are very proud. From its inception to present day, this chapter has provided service to all mankind in an exemplary and noteworthy manner. This is not only reflected in various awards and accolades bestowed upon the membership, but also through its longevity and growth in membership. Furthermore, the tremendous impact this chapter has had in diverse sectors of the community also emphasizes the outstanding works of this chapter. This distinct history will be chronicled through reflective summaries of the chartering of Epsilon Phi Omega and national, regional, and local programs. In addition, there are highlights of chapter membership, celebrations, community outreach, and awards. These narratives begin with notable events during the administration of the chapter's first basileus, Velma Daye. Through her leadership Epsilon Phi Omega was chartered. The history will also include a recapping of current initiatives carried out under the leadership of Dr. Tesha Isler.

Schooling Diaspora relates the previously untold story of twentieth-century female education and Chinese students living overseas in British Malaya and Singapore. Traversing more than a century of British imperialism, Chinese migration, and Southeast Asian nationalism, this book explores the pioneering English- and Chinese-language girls' schools in which these women studied and worked, drawing on school records, missionary annals, colonial reports, periodicals, and oral interviews. The history of educated overseas Chinese girls and women reveals the surprising reach of transnational female affiliations and activities in an age commonly assumed to be male dominated. These women created and joined networks in schools, workplaces, associations, and politics. They influenced notions of labor and social relations in Asian and European societies. They were at the center of political debates over language and ethnicity, and were vital actors in struggles over twentieth-century national belonging. Their education empowered them to defy certain socio-cultural conventions, in ways that school founders and political authorities did not anticipate. At the same time, they contended with an elite male discourse that perpetuated patriarchal views of gender, culture, and nation. Even as their schooling propelled them into a cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic public space, Chinese girls and women in diaspora often had to take sides as Malayan and Singaporean society became polarized-sometimes falsely-into mutually exclusive groups of British loyalists, pro-China nationalists, and Southeast Asian citizens. They negotiated these constraints to build unique identities, ultimately contributing to the development of a new figure: the educated transnational Chinese woman.

This groundbreaking book challenges the medicalized approach to women's experiences including menstruation, pregnancy, and menopause and suggests that there are better ways for women to cope with real issues they may face. Before any woman diets, douches, botoxes, reduces, reconstructs, or fills a prescription for antidepressants, statins, hormones, menstrual suppressants, or diet pills, she should read this book. Contesting common medical practice, the book addresses the many aspects of women's lives that have been targeted as "deficient" in order to support the billion-dollar profits of the medical-pharmacological industry and suggests alternatives to these "remedies." The contributors-psychologists, sociologists, and health experts-are also gender experts and feminist scholars who recognize the ways in which gender is an important aspect of the human experience. In this eye-opening work, they challenge the marketing and "science" that increasingly render women's bodies and experiences as a series of symptoms, diseases, and dysfunctions that require treatment by medical professionals who prescribe pharmaceutical and surgical interventions. Each article in the book addresses the marketing of a specific "condition" that has been constructed in a way that convinces a woman that her body is inadequate or her experience and behavior are not good enough. Among the topics addressed are menstruation, menopause, pregnancy, post-partum adjustment, sexual desire, weight, body dissatisfaction, moodiness, depression, grief, and anxiety. Addresses popular topics including the "thin ideal," the health realities of weight, cosmetic surgery, birth as a medical emergency, sexual desire and menopause, depression, and mourning Critiques the "science" and marketing that sees all women's complaints as symptoms, diseases, and dysfunctions requiring medical treatment Explains how psychological and social factors affect women's health and argues for a more well-founded approach such as using talk therapy first Explains why events like menopause, sexual desire, body dissatisfaction, and grief are examples of issues often not best treated with drugs, but with psychotherapy for permanent resolution Will appeal to all adult women who might, or do, question current medical approaches and media promises

Every year 5% of all breast cancer diagnosis occur in women under the age of forty. They do not have the time to be sick, stop their lives or even take the time to care for themselves. This book is for them-the women outside the common statistics, like me. Someone who has been rocked by a scary diagnosis but continues to rock-on. Someone who needs to laugh in the face of fear. It is scary-but hey, if I can get through it, anyone can. The one thing I know for sure, laughter heals. I realized long ago, before cancer, that if I didn t laugh, I d cry. I choose to laugh. I hope you do too.

Shortly after Alysa Cummings was diagnosed with breast cancer, she sat down at her laptop computer and began keeping a journal. Over the two years of her cancer treatment, Alysa continued writing as she moved through the healthcare delivery system:

"I fantasized that I could somehow use my computer to craft a story with an upbeat next chapter or fairy tale happily-ever-after ending. Looking back, that's the only explanation I can come up with, why I felt so compelled to create a record of my day-to-day experiences as a cancer patient. The one thing I could control were these words that crowded each other as they quickly appeared on my computer screen; these stories that flowed through my fingertips in such a manic rush; these traumatic adventures that happened to me in a place I began to call CancerLand.

CancerLand: it's this parallel universe, I swear, separate and apart from the rest of life as I once knew it. How did I end up in this wacky Bizarro World filled with freaky language and even stranger rituals? "

Gradually her daily journal entries became vignettes and poems that were published on the OncoLink website. Greetings from CancerLand, a collection of Alysa's writing from 2002-2012, charts one breast cancer survivor's journey as she discovers the power of writing to move her recovery forward.

In 1948, the Constitution of the World Health Organization declared, "Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity." Yet this idea was not predominant in the United States immediately after World War II, especially when it came to women's reproductive health. Both legal and medical institutions-and the male legislators and physicians who populated those institutions-reinforced women's second class social status and restricted their ability to make their own choices about reproductive health care. In More Than Medicine, Jennifer Nelson reveals how feminists of the '60s and '70s applied the lessons of the new left and civil rights movements to generate a women's health movement. The new movement shifted from the struggle to revolutionize health care to the focus of ending sex discrimination and gender stereotypes perpetuated in mainstream medical contexts. Moving from the campaign for legal abortion to the creation of community clinics and feminist health centers, Nelson illustrates how these activists revolutionized health care by associating it with the changing social landscape in which women had power to control their own life choices. More Than Medicine poignantly reveals how social justice activists in the United States gradually transformed the meaning of health care, pairing traditional notions of medicine with less conventional ideas of "healthy" social and political environments.

The evil of female exploitation
Human bondage and the exploitation of the weak, poor and vulnerable is as old as human kind itself. It is such a primal aspect of human nature that there have been long periods of history where it was considered the natural order, and in numerous cultures the members of which could dispassionately view the matter without it ever occurring to them that it might be morally reprehensible. Such is the mobility of morality. That situation, of course, prevailed openly in 'modern' western societies until very recently and certainly abides in the wider world less openly to this day. The traffic in young women to be used as labour slaves and especially those to be forced into prostitution has a history equally as long. Indeed, all know that this exploitation persists to the present time and is seemingly impossible to eradicate as it provides enormous revenue for the unscrupulous and gratification for the irrepressible base instincts of men. This book, written at the turn of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, sought in its day to make the public aware of the practice of 'white slavery' in an attempt to promote its eradication. The circumstances of the victims of times past may have been different in detail to those of today's enslaved, but the common thread of exploitation remains the same. This book is an interesting chronicle on the subject from an historical perspective and will engross all those interested in learning more. It poignantly demonstrates that the practice and the battle against human trafficking has been long established and-though the war proceeds without final victory or the expectation of it-long opposed. Available in softcover and hardback with dustjacket.

Surviving HIV/AIDS in the Inner City explores the survival strategies of poor, HIV-positive Puerto Rican women by asking four key questions: Given their limited resources, how did they manage an illness as serious as HIV/AIDS? Did they look for alternatives to conventional medical treatment? Did the challenges they faced deprive them of self-determination, or could they help themselves and each other? What can we learn from these resourceful women? Based on her work with minority women living in Newark, New Jersey, Sabrina Marie Chase illuminates the hidden traps and land mines burdening our current health care system as a whole. For the women she studied, alliances with doctors, nurses, and social workers could literally mean the difference between life and death. By applying the theories of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu to the day-to-day experiences of HIV-positive Latinas, Chase explains why some struggled and even died while others flourished and thrived under difficult conditions. These gripping, true-life stories advocate for those living with chronic illness who depend on the health care "safety net." Through her exploration of life and death among Newark's resourceful women, Chase provides the groundwork for inciting positive change in the U.S. health care system.