Complemented by statistics and facts about the AIDS epidemic, a series of interviews with women infected with HIV reveals the impact of the disease on their lives, exploring their feelings of blame, regret, and fear

Educator Patti Lather and psychologist Chris Smithies observed and chronicled support groups for women diagnosed with HIV. Whether black, Latina, poor, or middle class, the women in these groups share the common bond of living with HIV/AIDS, and they describe how it affects their lives in terms full of practical reality and moving poignancy, as they fight the disease, accept, reflect, live and die with and in it.

A dead woman returns to life as guardian angel for Mary Murphy in order to sort her life. Mary is in a state, her fiancé dropped her for another woman, she lost her job, and her adoptive mother died in mysterious circumstances.

On the surface of things, Sharon Lewis is a lot like any other happily married mother of three: she is the beating heart of a house full of kids, cooking and chaos, the one who always knows the after-school practice schedule, where her husband put the car keys and who needs a little extra TLC. Her kids and husband think she's a little spooky, actually, the way she can anticipate the tensions of any situation—and maybe they love her all the more for the extra care she gives them. Life is definitely good until the morning Heather Edwards, a pregnant teenaged friend of the family, kills herself. The reverberations of that act, and the ugly secrets that sparked it, prove deeply unsettling to the whole family, and stir up Sharon's own troubling secret: she has DID, or dissociative identity disorder. And the multiples inside the woman the world knows as Sharon seem to know what happened to Heather, and what may be happening to Heather's surviving sister. Will Sharon's need to protect the innocent cause her to finally come clean about her true nature with her family and friends, and not just in the anonymous chat rooms on the web where she's connected to others like herself? Will a woman with DID be able to persuade her quiet and respectable community that evil things can happen even in the nicest homes?

Winner of the 2008 Critics' Choice Award presented by the American Educational Studies Association In this follow-up to her classic text Troubling the Angels, an experimental ethnography of women with AIDS, Patti Lather deconstructs her earlier work to articulate methodology out of practice and to answer the question: What would practices of research look like that were a response to the call of the wholly other? She addresses some of the key issues challenging social scientists today, such as power relations with subjects in the field, the crisis in representation, difference, deconstruction, praxis, ethics, responsibility, objectivity, narrative strategy, and situatedness. Including a series of essays, reflections, and interviews marking the trajectory of the author's work as a feminist methodologist, Getting Lost will be an important text for courses in sociology of science, philosophy of science, ethnography, feminist methodology, women and gender studies, and qualitative research in education and related social science fields.

Michael Hiebert's remarkable debut novel tells the riveting story of a small southern town haunted by tragedy, one brave woman's struggle to put a troubling mystery to rest--and its impact on the sensitive boy who comes of age in the midst of it all. . . Abe Teal wasn't even born when Ruby Mae Vickers went missing twelve years ago. Few people in Alvin, Alabama, talk about the months spent looking for her, or about how Ruby Mae's lifeless body was finally found beneath a willow tree. Even Abe's mom, Leah, Alvin's only detective, has avoided the subject. But now, another girl is missing. Fourteen-year-old Mary Ann Dailey took the bus home from school as usual, then simply vanished. Townsfolk comb the dense forests and swampy creeks to no avail. Days later, Tiffany Michelle Yates disappears. Abe saw her only hours before, holding an ice cream cone and wearing a pink dress. Observant and smart, Abe watches his mother battle small-town bureaucracy and old resentments, desperate to find both girls and quietly frantic for her own children's safety. As the search takes on a terrifying urgency, Abe traverses the shifting ground between innocence and hard-won understanding, eager to know and yet fearing what will be revealed. Dream with Little Angels is by turns lyrical, heartbreaking, and shocking--a brilliantly plotted novel of literary suspense and of the dark shadows, painful secrets, and uncompromising courage in one small town. "One of the best books I've read in a long, long while." --Lisa Jackson, New York Times bestselling author

These inspiring true stories of God's intervention--and of heavenly victories over difficult circumstances and opposing forces--will strengthen your faith and leave you astounded.