"You’d think a Miss America swimsuit winner would feel completely confident about her body, right? Not always! So I decided to write the book I wish I’d had as a teen and in college—an honest, funny, practical, medically accurate, totally reassuring guide to how women’s bodies actually look, smell, feel, behave, and change. Alongside real-deal photographs of women just like you and me (no airbrushing, no supermodels, no kidding) you’ll find medical pictures of things you need to be able to recognize, true confessions by yours truly, and the encouragement you need to appreciate the uniqueness, strength, and beauty of your body. What are you waiting for?"—Nancy Redd From fashion magazines to taboo Web sites, curious young women have access to tons of old wives' tales about and thousands of airbrushed and inaccurate images of the female body—misinformation and harmful portrayals that can lead to low self-esteem, self-destructive acts, or even disturbing plastic surgery procedures. Teaming up with a leading physician specializing in adolescent health issues, Harvard graduate and former Miss Virginia Nancy Redd now offers a down-to-earth, healing, and reassuring response to those damaging myths. In Body Drama, Redd gives girls insight into the issues they're often too ashamed to raise with a doctor or parent. She also reveals her own experiences with the culture of "American beauty," and shows readers all the many versions of "normal." From body hair and bras, to acne and weight issues, along with crucial issues such as the importance of a healthy self image, Body Drama is a groundbreaking book packed with informative fast facts, FYIs, how-tos, and moving personal anecdotes as well as hundreds of un-retouched photographs. A highly visual book, it’s the first of its kind for women: filled with real information and real photographs of real bodies, to celebrate all our different shapes and sizes. Named by Glamour magazine as one of America’s top-ten college women "most likely to succeed—at anything," Redd has spent the most recent years of her life on a mission to tackle the issues least discussed but most significant in young women’s lives. Celebrating the many versions of "normal," and replacing seriously erroneous information with the honest, medically proven truth in a language all girls can understand, Body Drama dares to empower a new generation—with facts instead of fantasies, and the priceless gift of self-knowledge.

From fashion magazines to taboo Web sites, curious girls have access to tons of old wives' tales about the female body - usually misinformation and harmful portrayals that lead to low self-esteem, self-destructive acts and even disturbing plastic surgery procedures. Here is a healing, reassuring response to damaging myths from former Miss Virgina, Nancy Redd. She addresses the issues that most girls are too ashamed to raise, from body hair to bras and from weight to acne.

Challenges popular misconceptions and commercial representations of physical beauty that may compromise a teen's self-esteem and promote cosmetic surgery procedures, in an anecdotal assessment of healthy body features that covers such topics as weight, acne, and breast size.

Read Nancy Redd's blogs and other content on the Penguin Community. The New York Times bestselling author of Body Drama addresses anxieties young women face about weight, diet, exercise, and body image. At a time when both obesity and eating disorders are on the rise, Harvard graduate and former Miss Virginia Nancy Redd provides a much- needed resource for millions of young women and concerned parents. In her uniquely reassuring "big sister" voice and with a fresh, fun, and frank attitude that has made her the nation's go-to girl for body issues, Nancy addresses the common, painful, and shameful "diet dramas" that most mainstream diet and nutrition books miss, including: "I think I'm healthy, but medical charts say I'm not"; "I can't afford a gym so I can't exercise properly"; and "I just want to have weight loss surgery and be done with it." Nancy's advice is vetted by a leading adolescent medicine expert and the book is packed with informative "fast facts," moving personal anecdotes of Nancy's own diet experiences, and revolutionary real-deal four-color photographs of young women sized 2 to 22. Finally, a food and fitness book that doesn't condescend or blame, Diet Drama begins with body image and shows readers that health comes in all shapes and sizes. Watch a Video

Men and women in early modern Europe experienced their bodies very differently from the ways in which contemporary men and women do. In this challenging and innovative book, Gail Kern Paster examines representations of the body in Elizabethan-Jacobean drama in the light of humoral medical theory, tracing the connections between the history of the visible social body and the history of the subject's body as experienced from within. Focusing on specific bodily functions and on changes in the forms of embarrassment associated with them, Paster extends the insights of such critics and theorists as Mikhail Bakhtin, Norbert Elias, and Thomas Laqueur. She first surveys comic depictions of incontinent women as "leaky vessels" requiring patriarchal management and then considers the relation between medical bloodletting practices and the gender implications of blood symbolism. Next she relates the practice of purging to the theme of shame and assays ideas about pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing in medical and other nonliterary texts. Paster then turns to the use of reproductive processes in the plot structures of key Shakespeare plays and in Dekker's, Ford's, and Rowley's Witch of Edmonton. Including twelve vivid illustrations, The Body Embarrassed will be fascinating reading for students and scholars in the fields of Renaissance studies, gender studies, literary theory, the history of drama, and cultural history.

"This study has essentially two focuses, two stories to tell. One story traces the secularization, theatricalization, and uncanny returns of suppressed religious culture in early modern drama. The other story concerns the tendency of the theater to expose contingencies and gaps in politico-judicial practices of spectacular violence." "The investigation covers a broad range of plays dating from the fifteenth century to the closing of the theatres in 1642; however, three chapters are devoted to extensive analysis of single plays: R.B.'s Apius and Virginia, Shakespeare's 2 Henry VI, and Marlowe's Doctor Faustus."--Jacket.

The early modern period was an age of anatomical exploration and revelation, with new discoveries capturing the imagination not only of scientists but also of playwrights and poets. Approximate Bodies examines, in fascinating detail, the changing representation of the body in early modern drama and in the period's anatomical and gynaecological treatises. Maurizio Calbi focuses on the unstable representation of both masculinity and femininity in Renaissance texts such as The Duchess of Malfi, The Changeling and a variety of Shakespeare plays. Drawing on theorists including Foucault, Derrida and Lacan, these close textual readings examine the effects of social, psychic and cultural influences on early modern images of the body. Calbi identifies the ways in which political, social, racial and sexual power structures effect the construction of the body in dramatic and anatomical texts. Calbi's analysis displays how images such as the deformed body of the outsider, the effeminate body of the desiring male and the disfigured body parts of the desiring female indicate an unstable, incomplete conception of the body in the Renaissance. Compelling and impeccably researched, this is a sophisticated account of the fantasies and anxieties that play a role in constructing the early modern body. Approximate Bodies makes a major contribution to the field of early modern studies and to debates around the body.