In the preface to Volume 1 of the 'Annals of Life Insurance Medicine' Dr. MAX E. EISENRING described the goal of this publication as follows: "Any project which aims at contributing substantially to the modern science of medical underwriting can do so only if the many people preoccupied with these problems throughout the world join forces to the ultimate benefit of those most in need of life assurance." In an endeavour to keep the life insurance medical directors all over the world informed of the developments in the field of life insurance medicine, we have decided to publish the papers which were presented at the 11 th International Congress of Life Assurance Medicine in Mexico in 1973 in Volume 5 of the 'Annals'. We are most grateful to Dr. J. REN06N, President of the Organizing Commit tee of the Congress in Mexico for having consented to our publishing the proceed ings of the Congress in a special edition of the 'Annals'. It is a source of great satisfaction to us that in this way a much larger circle of life insurance medical directors can be reached than would have been the case if only the participants themselves were to receive the proceedings of the Congress. Dissemination of the results of medical research on an international basis, in particular those findings that have a bearing on life insurance medicine, is one of our foremost aims."

Today, the integration of life insurance medicine into the framework of general medicine goes without saying. On the one hand, the diagnostic therapeutic knowledge of clinical medical science forms the tools of the insurance medical adviser for the evaluation of life insurance applications. On the other hand, life insurance medicine has been able to pro vide valuable statistical data for long-term prognosis which have become an essential part of the daily medical practice and prognostic appraisal. This mutual engagement and en richment has again distinctly manifested itself in the scientific program of the 13th Con gress of Life Assurance Medicine held in Madrid. Among the broad and varied data available, the insurance problem of cancer and ma lignant diseases of the haematopoietic system were extensively dealt with for the first time. Diagnostic therapeutic progress increasingly allows valuable insurance cover to be granted to formerly uninsurable risks, a group which is particularly in need of, and re quires, life insurance cover. The number of risks which are uninsurable becomes smaller and smaller."

Framing Marilynne Robinson's fiction within the dynamics of everyday life, this study highlights the tensions of form and content that haunt moments of transcendence in her work. Robinson's novels, it argues, construct a world that is mimetic as well as symbolic and revelatory. Although the heightened apprehension of the quotidian in Robinson's novels often registers powerfully and beautifully in representational terms, its aesthetic intensity is enacted at the expense of characters who patrol the margins of the ordinary with unceasing vigilance. Inhabiting the everyday self-consciously, her protagonists perform a forced relationship to the ordinary that seldom relaxes into the natural or the familiar; scarred by grief, illness, aging, and trauma, they inhabit a world of transcendent beauty suffused with the terrifying threat of loss. Stiffly perched on the edge of un-cushioned furniture or propped awkwardly in the midst of someone else's conversation, Robinson's characters hover in the margins of a lived experience they are often forced to observe self-consciously and vigilantly. The signature acts of transfiguration that punctuate Robinson's narratives originate from and anticipate the inevitability of absence: the death of loved ones (Housekeeping), the impending death of the self (Gilead), the fracture of family (Home), the repetition of trauma and abandonment (Lila), the prohibition of everyday intimacy in interracial romance (Jack). Highlighting the tensions of the uncomfortable ordinary that disrupt a trajectory of transcendence in her fiction, this book situates Robinson's novels within sociological, psychological, and phenomenological studies of trauma, grief, aging, race, and gender, as well as narrative theory and everyday life studies. Focusing on the experiential dynamics of the lived worlds her novels invoke, The Elusive Everyday argues for the complexity, relevance, and contemporaneity of Robinson's fiction.

In der gegenwartigen Entwicklungsphase der Bronchologie handelt es sich nicht mehr so sehr um ihren Ausbau als urn den Einbau der gewonnenen Erkennt- nisse in die Pathologie und die Klinik der Lungentuberkulose. Diese Situation hat eine Reihe ausgezeichneter, einschlagiger Monographien heryorgerufen, unter denen diejenige TANNERS einen hervorragenden Platz einnimmt. Tracheo- und Bronchoskopie sind zwar keineswegs als junge Methoden zu bezeichnen, doch haben sie, man konnte sagen, fast unvermittelt einen ungewohn- ten Aufschwung genommen und ungeahnte Bedeutung erlangt. Sie haben die Ein- sicht in die Entstehung und den Ablauf krankhaften Geschehens in der Lunge wesentlich vertieft und damit eine Umschichtung des Wissens um die Lungen- tuberkulose und die Lungenerkrankung iiberhaupt gebracht und nicht zuletzt eine Erweiterung des K6nnens angebahnt, nicht nur dem Spezialarzt fiir Lungenkrank- heiten und dem Internisten, sondern auch dem praktischen Arzt neue Gesichts- punkte gebracht. Ein Mehr an Studium, das ihm auferlegt wird, wird bei weitem aufgewogen, denn die Bedeutung der neuen Erkenntnisse reicht iiber das Spezial- gebiet weit hinaus und hat entscheidende Riickwirkungen bis in die tagliche Praxis hinein. Nicht urn eine Abspaltung einer Spezialitat innerhalb der Spezialitat handelt es sich, sondern im Gegenteil, urn den Einbau der mit sorgfaltiger Methodik gewonnenen Resultate in das Ganze, urn eine wohlgelungene syntheti- sche Leistung. Angesichts der iiberragenden Bedeutung der bildlichen Darstellung ist der Auswahl und Qualitat der Bilder ganz besonderes Augenmerk geschenkt worden.

In Bossier City, Louisiana, Police are called to a trailer in a mobile home park where the badly decomposed body of a man has been found, in bed, with a bullet hole in his right temple. The laptop next to the body contains confessions in the form of journals that will reach all the way to the FBI field office in Stockton, California, sending Agents Sam Runyan and Monica Sterling on an interstate investigation of murders committed over a forty eight year period. As they work with local authorities to locate and bring closure to the families of victims, Sam and Monica discover that there is much more to learn than the journals reveal, and much more to the corpse in the bed than meets the eye. -Dark Trail is the page turning sequel to The Christmas Club, and a man named Cole Everman is the link that connects the stories and puts the training and talents of these two top Agents to the test.

There's more to Cole Everman than meets the eye. It is 1964 and in this coming of age story of a ninth grader in a small central California town, there is more to deal with than girls, parents and the prospect of going to war in Viet Nam. There's also a red and white '56 Chevy and a family of bullies nicknamed "The Christmas Club." This is the story of how Cole deals with seemingly insurmountable challenges, and embarks upon a life of intrigue that continues in the sequel, "Dark Trail" by the same author. (Following "The Christmas Club" enjoy 5 short stories designed to be read at night by a low light. Titles: "The Girl in 314" "Lover's Quarrel" "Mud Room" "Wanda Goes Away" and "No Reprieve")

"If the dying body makes us flinch and look away, struggling not to see what we have seen, the lost body disappears from cultural view, buried along with the sensory traces of its corporeal presence."-from the Introduction American popular culture conducts a passionate love affair with the healthy, fit, preferably beautiful body, and in recent years theories of embodiment have assumed importance in various scholarly disciplines. But what of the dying or dead body? Why do we avert our gaze, speak of it only as absence? This thoughtful and beautifully written book-illustrated with photographs by Shellburne Thurber and other remarkable images-finds a place for the dying and lost body in the material, intellectual, and imaginary spaces of contemporary American culture. Laura E. Tanner focuses her keen attention on photographs of AIDS patients and abandoned living spaces; newspaper accounts of September 11; literary works by Don DeLillo, Donald Hall, Sharon Olds, Marilynne Robinson, and others; and material objects, including the AIDS Quilt. She analyzes the way in which these representations of the body reflect current cultural assumptions, revealing how Americans read, imagine, and view the dynamics of illness and loss. The disavowal of bodily dimensions of death and grief, she asserts, deepens rather than mitigates the isolation of the dying and the bereaved. Lost Bodies will speak to anyone imperiled by the threat of loss.

"If the dying body makes us flinch and look away, struggling not to see what we have seen, the lost body disappears from cultural view, buried along with the sensory traces of its corporeal presence."-from the Introduction American popular culture conducts a passionate love affair with the healthy, fit, preferably beautiful body, and in recent years theories of embodiment have assumed importance in various scholarly disciplines. But what of the dying or dead body? Why do we avert our gaze, speak of it only as absence? This thoughtful and beautifully written book-illustrated with photographs by Shellburne Thurber and other remarkable images-finds a place for the dying and lost body in the material, intellectual, and imaginary spaces of contemporary American culture. Laura E. Tanner focuses her keen attention on photographs of AIDS patients and abandoned living spaces; newspaper accounts of September 11; literary works by Don DeLillo, Donald Hall, Sharon Olds, Marilynne Robinson, and others; and material objects, including the AIDS Quilt. She analyzes the way in which these representations of the body reflect current cultural assumptions, revealing how Americans read, imagine, and view the dynamics of illness and loss. The disavowal of bodily dimensions of death and grief, she asserts, deepens rather than mitigates the isolation of the dying and the bereaved. Lost Bodies will speak to anyone imperiled by the threat of loss.

"Tanner deals with the central question of all narrative texts: how the reader is manipulated into empathy or distance by the text.... This study... is the sort that needs to be redone in every classroom and by every mature reader.... Tanner offers provocative and useful discussions of rape and torture... " Choice

"This thoughtful and disturbing book raises serious questions about the consequences... of reading representations of rape and torture. " American Literature

"In this incisive exploration of twentieth-century novels, art, and ads, Laura Tanner explains the mechanisms by which reader and viewer are implicated in violence. Equally effective as a challenge to textual assault is the grace and gentleness of Tanner s own prose. Intimate Violence signals the emergence of an astute and humane critical voice." Wendy Steiner

Through an examination of such notorious works as The White Hotel and American Psycho, Laura Tanner leads us in a disturbing exploration of the reader s complicity with fictional depictions of intimate violence."