WANTED FOR KIDNAPPING: a beautiful blonde with a penchant for trouble. May be armed (with bad intentions) and dangerously seductive… Kerry Sullivan is running out of time—and patience. With her brother wrongfully accused of embezzling millions, she can’t face one more humiliating hang up from the man she’s begging for help. Rafael Dawson may be one of the top electronic security experts in the country—and the only man who can prove her brother’s innocence—but his phone manners are appalling. Damn Yankee. Too bad kidnapping the man isn’t an option. Or is it? There’s nothing Kerry wouldn’t do for her brother. There are lots of things she longs to do to Rafe Dawson when he’s lying tied up and naked in Kerry’s secret hideaway. Rafe is certainly something to look at, but her brother’s life is riding on her pulling off the impossible: getting this man who’s always in control to lose it. But when the tables are turned, Kerry finds herself at Rafe’s mercy. And the only way to get her way is to let him have his way—with her… MATURE AUDIENCE

Christopher Castiglia gives shape to a tradition of American women's captivity narrative that ranges across three centuries, from Puritan colonist Mary Rowlandson's abduction by Narragansett Indians to Patty Hearst's kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army. Examining more than sixty accounts by women captives, as well as novels ranging from Susanna Rowson's eighteenth-century Rueben and Rachel to today's mass-market romances, Castiglia investigates paradoxes central to the genre. In captivity, women often find freedom from stereotypical role attributes of helplessness, dependency, sexual vulnerability, and xenophobia. In their condemnations of their non-white captors, they defy assumptions about race that undergird their own societies. Castiglia questions critical conceptions of captivity stories as primarily an appeal to racism and misogyny and instead finds in them imaginative challenges to rigid gender roles and racial ideologies. Whether the women of these stories resist or escape captivity, endure until they are released, or eventually choose to live among their captors, they emerge with the power to be critical of both cultures. These compelling narratives, with their boundary crossings and persistent explorations of cultural differences, have significant implications for current investigations into the construction of gender, race, and nation.

This revealing history of corsetry ranges from the 19th through the mid-20th centuries to show how simple laced bodices developed into corsets of cane, whalebone, and steel. Lavish illustrations include line drawings and photographs from a diversity of sources, such as clothing catalogs, newspaper and popular magazine advertisements, and magazine articles.

"The main purpose of this work is to chronicle and categorize the life experiences of 519 persons who entered Maryland as indentured servants or, to a lesser extent, as convicts forcibly transported [between 1634-1777]. The text itself is composed of solidly researched sketches of Maryland servants and convicts and their descendants, including 84 that are traced to the third generation or beyond."--Amazon.com.

“I’ve never seen more information about Wonder Woman than in Wonder Woman Unbound. Tim Hanley tells us everything we’ve never asked about Wonder Woman, . . . from her mythic Golden Age origins through her dismal Silver Age years as a lovesick romance comic character, and worse yet, when she lost her costume and powers in the late 1960s. Our favorite Amazon’s saga becomes upbeat again with the 1970s advent of Gloria Steinem and Ms. magazine, and Lynda Carter’s unforgettable portrayal of her on television. And it’s all told with a dollop of humor!” —Trina Robbins, author of Pretty in Ink With her golden lasso and her bullet-deflecting bracelets, Wonder Woman is a beloved icon of female strength in a world of male superheroes. But this close look at her history portrays a complicated heroine who is more than just a female Superman. Tim Hanley explores Wonder Woman’s lost history, delving into her comic book and its spin-offs as well as the motivations of her creators, to showcase the peculiar journey of a twentieth-century icon—from the 1940s, when her comics advocated female superiority but were also colored by bondage imagery and hidden lesbian leanings, to her resurgence as a feminist symbol in the 1970s and beyond. Tim Hanley is a comic book historian. His blog, Straitened Circumstances, discusses Wonder Woman and women in comics, and his column “Gendercrunching” runs monthly on Bleeding Cool. He lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia.