Bodies and Barriers offers a collection of dramatic pieces of our time that provide an aesthetic perspective from which we view today’s vital health issues. With each play exploring a different medical crisis, the collection covers a range of issues common to a diverse population, irrespective of gender or race. Included are works examining how individuals confront the challenges posed by physical disability, aging, and terminal illness. These plays take as their subject the human form and its pathologies while providing a humanistic perspective from which to view men and women as they come to terms with a loss of physical and emotional well-being.

In 1999, Lisa Moore, one of Funky’s friends and a main character, discovered she had breast cancer. Batiuk, unsure about dealing with such a serious subject on the funny pages, decided to go ahead with the story line. He approached the topic with the idea that mixing humor with serious and real themes heightens the reader’s interest. Lisa and husband Les faced the same physical, psychological, and social issues as anyone else dealing with the disease.

An emergency physician and faculty member at Brown Medical School, Jay Baruch has long been fascinated by how illness can make people strangers to their own bodies, how we all struggle to maintain control as the body decays and life slowly becomes unrecognizable, and how health professionals discover and struggle with the limits of their own competence and compassion. In Fourteen Stories, Baruch doesn’t present a series of clinically based essays but a rich collection of short fiction that gives voice to a variety of people who, faced with difficult moral choices, find themselves making disturbing self-discoveries.

On June 2, 1854, crowds lined the streets of Boston, hissing and shouting at federal authorities as they escorted the fugitive slave Anthony Burns to the ship that would return him to his slaveholders in Virginia. Days earlier, handbills had littered the streets decrying Burns’s arrest, and abolitionists, intent on freeing Burns, had attacked with a battering ram the courthouse in which he was detained, leaving one dead, several wounded, and thirteen in custody. In the end it would take federal officials nearly 2,000 troops and $40,000 to send Burns back to Virginia. No fugitive slave would be captured in Boston again.

e carefully analyzes the objective of dividing the Sino-Soviet alliance as a goal of Anglo-American policies and uses recently available Chinese Communist materials—including inner-party documents, diaries, memoirs, and biographies by and about former Chinese leaders, generals, and diplomats—to reconstruct Chinese foreign policy initiatives and responses to Western challenges. With its unique international and comparative dimensions, this study allows the first clear view of early Cold War history from the Chinese as well as Western perspectives. Washington and London differed widely in their assessments of Beijing’s intentions and capabilities, as reflected in their respective policies toward recognition and containment of China. Zhai examines the mutual influences and constraints—distinct strategic concerns, divergences in political structures, public opinion, interest groups, and diplomatic traditions, as well as the perceptions and idiosyncrasies of the top policymakers—that affected Anglo-American relations and shows how consideration of each other’s reactions further complicated their policy decisions.

Nin Andrews draws upon her childhood experiences of being raised on a farm in Virginia and her haunting dreams of her father in this Southern-flavored collection of poems.

Over the past thirty years, rural health care in the United States has changed dramatically. The stereotypical white-haired doctor with his black bag of instruments and his predominantly white, small-town clientele has imploded: the global age has reached rural America. Independently owned clinics have given way to a massive system of hospitals; new technology now brings specialists right to the patient’s bedside; and an increasingly diverse clientele has sparked the need for doctors and nurses with an equally diverse assortment of skills.

The Cincinnati Reds chronicles each season from the organization’s early years, most notably the 1882 American Association pennant and the 1919 and 1940 National League pennants and World Series championships, including the infamous Chicago White Sox scandal. Allen retells many of the early Reds stories likely forgotten or unknown by today’s fans. This book is as thorough as it is absorbing and will be enjoyed by those interested in the early days of America’s favorite pasttime.

“Rare in any age is work which incorporates a passion for experience, a commitment to truth, an ability to plumb the irrational, and a fluency in poetic language and music which can work through all these tangled thickets, but Eve Alexandra does just that. . . . This is true poetry; it immediately takes its place as a participant in the vast historical voice which composes poetry, a voice which contains ten-thousand tones, but which takes nothing unto itself which doesn’t resonate, as do the poems of The Drowned Girl, with authenticity and fervor.”—C. K. Williams, Judge

Shirley Povich’s history of the Washington Senators originally appeared in 1954 as part of the popular series of major league team histories published by G. P. Putnam. With their colorful prose and delightful narratives, the Putnam books have been described as the Cadillac of the genre and have become prized collectibles for baseball readers and historians.