Provocative reappraisal of the portrayal of women in Julio Cortázar's short stories.

The past is a ruthless hunter ... Ravi’s idyllic childhood ended the day he watched his mother, Radha, climb into a truck in the wee hours of the morning. Abandoned with his disease-stricken father, Mahesh, Ravi is hurtled into adulthood and the big, bad world. But respite from hardship is brief as father and son are parted and Ravi escapes to Mumbai to find fame and fortune in the big city. Here, in the hustle and bustle of the metropolis, Ravi can forget his past and concentrate on building a future as a successful Bollywood composer. He meets Sandhya, a beautiful, educated young socialite and is engaged to marry her. But when a body is found on the railway tracks, Ravi’s charmed existence is threatened by police enquiries that probe into his past.

A moving story of one family's attempt to make a difference. In 2011 Karen Scott and Mark Finlay and their six children opened their home and hearts to a sad, skinny five-year-old boy who was placed with them by New Zealand's Child, Youth and Family services. James arrived with nothing other than the clothes he was wearing, supposedly for just a short-term stay. But what followed were two turbulent years as Karen and Mark attempted to parent a very troubled young boy. Another Mother's Love is a heart-wrenching account of a mother's attempt to nurture her foster child with unconditional love and kindness. However, is love enough? Karen and Mark faced a harrowing decision – to give up James or risk their family's future. Also available as an eBook

In recent months the 'right-to-die' issue has gripped the nation. Two cases have captured the public imagination like no other: Frances Inglis, convicted of murder for ending the life of her brain-damaged son, and Kay Gilderdale, acquitted for assisting the suicide of her chronically ill daughter. These parallel stories provide a window onto a world of terrible suffering, where women feel that the only course of action open to them is to help their own children to die. What would you do if your child was experiencing unbearable pain? Is it a mother's duty in such a situation to perform the ultimate act - to kill the person she loves more than anything else in the world? Is the strength of a mother's love something that can be reflected in the law? A recent poll suggested that around 80% of British people support a change in the law to allow assisted suicide, a crime currently punishable by up to 14 years in prison - and an even higher proportion believe that relatives should be allowed to help their loved ones to die.

Religion is often denounced as one of the tools used by patriarchal societies to maintain the status quo, and especially to persuade women to accept subordinate roles. This does not explain, however, the existence of many religious groups in which women are both leaders and the majority of participants. How are these women's religions different from those dominated by men? What can we learn from them about the special ways in which women experience their unique reality? In this fascinating and pathbreaking work--the first comparative study of women's religions--Susan Starr Sered seeks answers to these compelling questions. Looking for common threads linking groups as diverse as the ancestral cults of the Black Caribs of Belize, Korean shamanism, Christian Science, and the Feminist Spirituality movement, Sered finds that motherhood and motherly concerns play a vital role in these female-dominated groups. Nurturing and concern for others are at the center, as are healing arts and ways of dealing with illness and the death of children. Religion not only enables women to find sacred meaning in their daily lives, from the preparation of food to caring for their families, but an offer intense and personal relationships with deities and spirits--often through ecstatic possession trance--as well as opportunities to celebrate and mourn with other women. By examining the shared experiences of women across great cultural divides, Priestess, Mother, Sacred Sister offers a new understanding of the role gender plays in determining how individuals grapple with the ultimate questions of existence. In the process, it not only highlights the profound differences between men and women, but the equally important ways in which we are all alike.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1988.

Theologian Erin S. Lane overturns dominant narratives about motherhood and inspires women to write their own stories. Is it possible to do something more meaningful than mothering? As a young Catholic girl who grew up in the American Midwest on white bread and Jesus, Erin S. Lane was given two options for a life well-lived: Mother or Mother Superior. She could marry a man and mother her own children, or she could marry God, so to speak, and mother the world’s children. Both were good outcomes for someone else’s life. Neither would fit the shape of hers. Interweaving Lane’s story with those of other women—including singles and couples, stepparents and foster parents, the infertile and the ambivalent—Someone Other Than a Mother challenges the social scripts that put moms on an impossible pedestal and shame childless women and nontraditional families for not measuring up. You may have heard these lines before: • “Motherhood is the toughest job.” This script diminishes the work of non-moms and pressures moms to make parenting their full-time gig. • “It’ll be different with your own.” This script underestimates the love of nonbiological kin and pushes unfair expectations onto nuclear families. • “Family is the greatest legacy.” This script turns children into the ultimate sign of a woman’s worth and discounts the quieter ways we leave our mark. With candor and verve, Someone Other Than a Mother tears up the shaming social scripts that are bad for moms and non-moms alike and rewrites the story of a life well-lived, one in which purpose is bigger than body parts, identity is fuller than offspring, and legacy is so much more than DNA.

Reiko Ohnuma offers a wide-ranging exploration of maternal imagery and discourse in pre-modern South Asian Buddhism, drawing on textual sources preserved in Pali and Sanskrit. She demonstrates that Buddhism in India had a complex and ambivalent relationship with mothers and motherhood-symbolically, affectively, and institutionally. Symbolically, motherhood was a double-edged sword, sometimes extolled as the most appropriate symbol for buddhahood itself, and sometimes denigrated as the most paradigmatic manifestation possible of attachment and suffering. On an affective level, too, motherhood was viewed with the same ambivalence: in Buddhist literature, warm feelings of love and gratitude for the mother's nurturance and care frequently mingle with submerged feelings of hostility and resentment for the unbreakable obligations thus created, and positive images of self-sacrificing mothers are counterbalanced by horrific depictions of mothers who kill and devour. Institutionally, the formal definition of the Buddhist renunciant as one who has severed all familial ties seems to co-exist uneasily with an abundance of historical evidence demonstrating monks' and nuns' continuing concern for their mothers, as well as other familial entanglements. Ohnuma's study provides critical insight into Buddhist depictions of maternal love and maternal grief, the role played by the Buddha's own mothers, Maya and Mahaprajapati, the use of pregnancy and gestation as metaphors for the attainment of enlightenment, the use of breastfeeding as a metaphor for the compassionate deeds of buddhas and bodhisattvas, and the relationship between Buddhism and motherhood as it actually existed in day-to-day life.

Healthy lifestyle and nutrition expert Beth Aldrich loves to eat-and she thinks everyone else should too. In Real Moms Love to Eat, she seduces readers with her amazing secrets to help them lose weight, look great and feel fabulous-while still enjoying the foods they love. Complete with pleasure-invoking assignments, explanations, tips, guidance, and delicious recipes, this unique ten-week plan will give women the tools to be slimmer, sexier, more energetic and more successful at everything they need to do each day!

“If I had two guns, I would shoot the two of you!” James screamed in the office. None of us responded. I was standing right in front of the door when James came toward me and slammed his fists into the window slit that was next to the door. “I want to break this fucking window!” James hollered. My heart was racing, and I just stood there. Walk through a day in the lives of a sixth-grade special education teacher and a few students who have many different needs. What happens to one of the middle school students, Stevie, and who is to blame? Is every student safe? Is what you are reading the full story? Witness through the eyes of Mrs. Smith and the anxiety that follows her at all the students’ behaviors. Are the kids really this challenging, or is there something that is causing this behavior? Will Mrs. Smith continue to try to have a child of her own when she knows the dangers that are lurking in this world?