Manhattan, the coldest night of the year -- six best friends rush to attend a celebration. Blown by wind and snow, the women arrive flushed, each caught in midadventure.... Tonight's the night of nights -- to rejoice in a new lover, leave an unfaithful husband, or decide to have a baby on one's own. These "six in the city" profes-sional women fight for their female choices. Sparks and zingers fly across the table....Love lives, secrets, and friendships go up in candle flame. Who will win -- the romantics or the realists? How can working women triumph in such trying times? While the cell phones chime and the biological clocks rewind, the friends enact a timeless ceremony. Here is our urban "friends-as-family" generation -- Beautiful Bodies is a dazzling comedy of manners in the grand tradition of Dorothy Parker and Mary McCarthy.

Blending social history and personal experiences, an exploration of how people try to control their bodies with food reveals the struggle everyone experiences with their own bodies.--

St. Augustine was known as a theologian of feeling for many centuries. Renaissance painters pictured him holding his passionately blazing heart in his hand. In Augustine’s society and education, feeling was considered an intimate and integral aspect of thinking, so intimately interwoven that philosophers struggled to distinguish these activities. Thus, Augustine was also committed to learning throughout his passionate and thoughtful life, from his early conviction that “God and the soul” can be known through the meticulous use of reason, to mature sermons in which he quoted “God is love,” and commented, in effect, that is all you need to know about God. The role of feeling in his understanding of the effect of Christian doctrines on present life has been less noticed. This book proposes that changes in his perception of the value and significance of human bodies—from objects of rapacious lust to rapturous admiration of their beauty—form the nexus within which Augustine’s thought and feeling cohere. The old Augustine’s understanding of the theological significance of present bodies informed his acknowledged speculations on the qualities and capacities of beautiful bodies, nunc et tunc.

This book explores the role of material culture in the formation of corporeal aesthetics and beauty ideals in different past societies and thus contributes to the cultural relativization of bodily aesthetics and related gender norms. The volume does not explore beauty for the sake of beauty, but extensively explores how it serves to form and keep gender norms in place. The concept of beauty has been a topic of interest for some time, yet it is only in recent times that archaeologists have begun to approach beauty as a culturally contingent and socially constructed phenomenon. Although archaeologists and ancient historians extensively dealt with gender, they dealt less with it in relation to beauty. The contributions in this volume deal with different intersections of gender and corporeal aesthetics by turning to rich archaeological, textual and iconographic data from ancient Sumer, Aegean Bronze Age, ancient Egypt, ancient Athens, Roman provinces, the Viking world and the Qajar Iran. Beauty thus moves away from a curiosity and surface of the body to an analytic concept for a better understanding of past and present societies.

This book explores the role of material culture in the formation of corporeal aesthetics and beauty ideals in different past societies and thus contributes to the cultural relativization of bodily aesthetics and related gender norms. The volume does not explore beauty for the sake of beauty, but extensively explores how it serves to form and keep gender norms in place. The concept of beauty has been a topic of interest for some time, yet it is only in recent times that archaeologists have begun to approach beauty as a culturally contingent and socially constructed phenomenon. Although archaeologists and ancient historians extensively dealt with gender, they dealt less with it in relation to beauty. The contributions in this volume deal with different intersections of gender and corporeal aesthetics by turning to rich archaeological, textual and iconographic data from ancient Sumer, Aegean Bronze Age, ancient Egypt, ancient Athens, Roman provinces, the Viking world and the Qajar Iran. Beauty thus moves away from a curiosity and surface of the body to an analytic concept for a better understanding of past and present societies.

A Beautiful Body Project: The Bodies of Mothers First in a series of books with a strong media platform of truthful photographs and stories to celebrate the irreplaceable beauty of women and the body positive movement happening all over the world. A Beautiful Body Project is an upcoming series of book volumes and an online media platform dedicated to women and body image, celebrated through the sharing stories about motherhood, aging, cancer, stillbirths, miscarriages, weigh-gain, weight-loss, dysmorphia, and beyond. Founder Jade Beall has been a photographer, a massage therapist, and an inspiring dance teacher for women for over a decade. Her work is touching thousands of lives around the world. This book, along with all subsequent volumes, will feature my signature non-digitally-augmented & no-air-brushing images of women, just as they are. This is the heart of the project, to reshape images of women in mass media, to celebrate us as us, nothing more, nothing less. The Beautiful Body Pledge - which in turn sums up the purpose of the book series - is as follows: I want to join the movement and agree to love my body more and more each day, to use kind words towards myself and towards other women, to be a role-model for future generations of mothers, and to choose to be empowered knowing that I am not alone, and that by coming together, we can reshape body image in mass-media, build self-esteem, and explore vulnerability as a collective. Jade Beall is a world-renowned Photographer specializing in truthful images of women to inspire feeling irreplaceably beautiful as a counter-balance to the airbrushed photo-shopped imagery that dominates mainstream media. Her recent work A Beautiful Body Project has touched 100,000's of women's lives and garnered global attention from media outlets including the BBC, The Huffington Post & beyond. Jade's book series and media platform feature untouched photos of women alongside their stories of their journeys to build self-esteem in a world that thrives off women feeling insecure. Jade's dream is to inspire future generations of women to be free from the unnecessary self-suffering and embrace their beauty just as they are.

This is not a story about art. Although Malvina Hoffman was known as America’s Rodin, her story is one of adventure, intrigue, and life among the greatest artists and powerbrokers during the early to mid-twentieth century. Every action Malvina undertook broke glass ceilings. She smashed through her fears to achieve the impossible, many times over. She was an inspiration to all.