In a blend of intimate memoir and passionate advocacy, Nancy Mairs takes on the subject woven through all her writing: disability and its effect on life, work, and spirit.

The novel interrogates the dynamics of challenging relationships, betrayals, forgiveness, and healing. When the pressure of having a male child becomes overwhelming, Adaugo seeks for ways to save her failing marriage. She blames her husband's infidelity on her inadequacies. The many marital challenges she experiences seem to be machinations of her fate. Nothing seems to save her marriage but Adaugo's love for her daughters. Will she leave, or will she stay to fight for her marriage? She turns to God and finds strength, not just to move on, but to extend forgiveness to her husband.

Not nearly as provocative as the title would have you believe, Three Guys Naked from the Waist Down is the story of three guys attempting to make something of themselves in the world of comedy. Overly melodramatic at times, the Michael Rupert and Jerry Colker musical is entertaining and boasts a performance by Scott Bakula of Quantum Leap fame.

In 1948 Andrew Wyeth produced what would become one of the most iconic paintings in American art: a desolate landscape featuring a woman lying in a field, that he called "Christina's World." The woman in the painting, Christina Olson, lived in Cushing, Maine, where Wyeth and his wife kept a summer house. She suffered from polio, and was paralyzed from the waist down; Wyeth was moved to portray her when he saw her one day crawling through the field towards her house. "Christina's World" was to become one of the most well-loved and most scorned works of the twentieth century, igniting heated arguments about parochialism, sentimentality, kitsch and elitism that have continued to dog the art world and Wyeth's own reputation, even after the artist's death in 2009. An essay by MoMA curator Laura Hoptman revisits the genesis of the painting, discussing Wyeth's curious focus, over the course of his career, on a deliberately delimited range of subjects and exploring the mystery that continues to surround the enigmatic painting.

A history of our time.

Presenting the history of corsetry and body sculpture, this edition shows how the relationship between fashion and sex is closely bound up with sexual self-expression. It demonstrates how the use of the corset rejected the role of the passive, maternal woman, so that in Victorian times it was seen as a scandalous threat to the social order.

At the end of the 16th century, scholars and intellectuals were seen as Faustian magicians, dangerous and sexy. By the 19th century, they were perceived as dusty and dried up, dead from the waist down, as Browning so wickedly put it. In this study, a literary critic explores the various ways we have thought about scholars and scholarship through the ages. classical scholar Isaac Casaubon who lived from 1559 to 1614; Mark Pattison, 19th-century rector at Oxford; and Mr Casaubon in George Eliot's Middlemarch. The three are intricately related, for Pattison was seen by many as the model for Eliot's Mr Casaubon and he was also the author of the best book on Isaac Casaubon. Nuttall offers a penetrating interpretation of Middlemarch and then describes how Pattison recorded his own introverted intellectual life and self-lacerating depression. He presents Isaac Casaubon, on the other hand, as a fulfilled scholar who personifies the ideal of detailed, unspectacular truth-telling, often imperilled in our own culture. Nuttall concludes with a meditation on morality, sexuality and the true virtues of scholarship.