In C. S. Lewis and the Middle Ages, medievalist Robert Boenig explores Lewis’s personal and professional engagement with medieval literature and culture and argues convincingly that medieval modes of creativity had a profound impact on Lewis’s imaginative fiction.

Although we rely on physicians, calling on them at birth and death and every medical event in between, rarely do we consider the personal challenges faced by doctors-to-be. In White Coats, Marino and Harrison bring readers into the classrooms, anatomy labs, and hospitals where the students take their first pulses, dissect their first cadavers, and deliver their first babies.

Since the 1970s, urban communities have had to face the wrenching process of economic restructuring. Events are too often framed [by the media] with a kind of economic determinism that denies agency to individual communities. To what degree can industrial cities still imagine themselves as authors of their own economic fates? Author Perry Bush explores this question by focusing on the small midwestern city of Lima, Ohio.

Since its debut on March 27, 1972, Funky Winkerbean has chronicled the lives of a group of students from the fictitious Westview High School. This volume, which presents the strip’s first three years, introduces the strip’s title character, Funky, and his friends Crazy Harry Klinghorn, Bull Bushka, Livinia Swenson, Les Moore, Holly Budd, and Roland Mathews. Prin- cipal Burch, counselor Fred Fairgood, and band director Harry L. Dinkle also make their first appearances.

Revelations captures the spirit of the African American worship experience through arresting images of congregants’ facial expressions and body language, their colorful uniforms and dress, and the solemnity of their worship. The images of baptisms, weddings, funerals, Sunday services, and special celebrations are at once serene and exaltant, pensive and inspirational. Revelations honors not only the spiritual dimension of the African American church but the pride and dignity that prevails within the churchgoing family.

When photographer Gary Harwood first stepped onto the K. W. Zellers family farm in Hartville, Ohio, to take pictures of the Mexican migrant workers there, he did not expect to find such a strong, tightly knit community. Over the next five years he used his camera to study the lives and work of these migrants in their northeastern Ohio home. His artful photography captures the migrants’ portraits and movingly conveys their great pride in work and family, their struggles and joys.

This important study challenges the standard interpretation that Lewis, Tolkien, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, and the other Inklings had little influence on one another’s work, drawing on the latest research in composition studies and the sociology of the creative process. Diana Glyer invites readers into the heart of the group, examining diary entries and personal letters and carefully comparing the rough drafts of their manuscripts with their final, published work.

Sure to place this case among the classics of crime literature, The Murder of Mary Bean and Other Stories features two reprinted accounts of Caswell’s death, both fictional and originally printed in the 1850s, as well as an introduction that places these salacious accounts in a historical context. This book serves not simply as true crime but, rather, presents a seamy side of rapid industrial growth and the public anxiety over the emerging economic roles of women.

What is it like to be a student nurse washing the feet of a dying patient? To be a newly graduated nurse, in charge of the Intensive Care Unit for the first time, who wonders if her mistake might have cost a life? Or to be an experienced nurse who, by her presence and care, holds a patient to this world? Poet and nurse practitioner Cortney Davis answers these questions by examining her own experiences and through them reveals a glimpse into the minds and hearts of those who care for us when we are at our most vulnerable. The Heart’s Truth offers the joys, frustrations, fears, and miraculous moments that nurses, new and experienced, face every day.