Synopses & Reviews
After World War II, banks and other mortgage lenders began requiring insurance to protect them against flawed or defective real estate titles. Over the past sixty years, the title insurance industry has grown steadily in size, power, and secrecy: policies are available for both lenders and property owners and many title insurers offer an array of other real estate services, such as escrow and appraisal. Yet details about the industry's operational procedures remain closely guarded from public exposure.
In The American Title Insurance Industry, Joseph and David Eaton present evidence that improvements in recordkeeping over the last sixty years—particularly the advent of computers—have reduced the likelihood of a defective title going unnoticed in a property transaction. But the industry's flaws run deeper than mere obsolescence: in most states, title insurers are allowed to engage in anticompetitive business practices, including price-fixing. Among the findings in this meticulously researched study are instances of insurers charging premiums well above the amount necessary to compensate them for assuming the risk of defect and identical policies with identical risk that vary in price by hundreds of percentage points for different geographic locations.The authors also examine the widely ignored role that the federal and most state governments play in perpetuating the title insurance industry's unfair practices. Whereas most private industries prefer as little government intervention as possible, title insurers welcome it. Federal statue exempts title insurers from anti-trust liability, opening the door for price-fixing and destroying any semblance of free-market competition or market power for consumers.A landmark study for elected officials, and all those involved in the insurance, real estate, and brokerage industries, The American Title Insurance Industry brings to light a long-neglected problem—and offers suggestions for how it might be remedied.
Review
“Shows the structural and symbolic processes underlying bodily erasure and exposure; a major accomplishment.”
-—Nelly Oudshoorn,author of The Male Pill
Review
“Missing Bodies focuses our attention on what is not there, and thus brilliantly illuminates just what is! This is a creative, thoughtful, exciting book, a fine contribution to the growing literature on the sociology of the body.”
- Barbara Katz Rothman, author of Recreating Motherhood
“Shows the structural and symbolic processes underlying bodily erasure and exposure; a major accomplishment.”
- Nelly Oudshoorn, author of The Male Pill
Review
"Overall the book opened my eyes to the experiences of the missing and what they mean for the rest of us who are visible and can do something about giving them a voice. It also makes me ask more questions about other missing bodies not mentioned, which, I believe, is the fundamental intent of the book."
“Missing Bodies focuses our attention on what is not there, and thus brilliantly illuminates just what is! This is a creative, thoughtful, exciting book, a fine contribution to the growing literature on the sociology of the body.”
“Shows the structural and symbolic processes underlying bodily erasure and exposure; a major accomplishment.”
Review
“[A] work that provides newly detailed history and analysis of title insurance, a little-studied industry.”
-Library Journal,
Review
“In this important and fascinating book, the authors expose a scam that has fleeced Americans of billions of their hard-earned dollars since World War II. The title insurance industry, they show, has captured its regulators, and imposed exceedingly high costs on American homebuyers by means of a cartel-like arrangement. If that arrangement can be broken, price gouging would end and all American homeowners would enjoy what Canadians and Iowans do—reasonably priced peace of mind.”
-Robert E. Wright,Stern School of Business, New York University
Review
"This book is written in a vivid style, endowed with a straightforward and pleasant way of expressing the authors' engaged analysis."-Claire Beaudevin,Social Anthropology
Review
"As a commentary on the consequences of neoliberalism, a critique of contemporary Western culture, and a recovery effort o fthe unseen, Missing Bodies is a provocative and thought provoking work that situates our understandings of the bodies that are seen and obscured in new light." -Erin L. Pullen,Sociology of Health and Illness
Synopsis
We know more about the physical body—how it begins, how it responds to illness, even how it decomposes—than ever before. Yet not all bodies are created equal, some bodies clearly count more than others, and some bodies are not recognized at all. In
Missing Bodies, Monica J. Casper and Lisa Jean Moore explore the surveillance, manipulations, erasures, and visibility of the body in the twenty-first century. The authors examine bodies, both actual and symbolic, in a variety of arenas: pornography, fashion, sports, medicine, photography, cinema, sex work, labor, migration, medical tourism, and war. This new politicsof visibility can lead to the overexposure of some bodies—Lance Armstrong, Jessica Lynch—and to the near invisibility of others—dead Iraqi civilians, illegal immigrants, the victims of HIV/AIDS and "natural" disasters.
Missing Bodies presents a call for a new, engaged way of seeing and recovering bodies in a world that routinely, often strategically,obscures or erases them. It poses difficult, even startling questions: Why did it take so long for the United States media to begin telling stories about the "falling bodies" of 9/11? Why has the United States government refused to allow photographs or filming of flag-draped coffins carrying the bodies of soldiers who are dying in Iraq? Why are the bodies of girls and women so relentlessly sexualized? By examining the cultural politics at work in such disappearances and inclusions of the physical body the authors show how the social, medical and economic consequences of visibility can reward or undermine privilege in society.
About the Author
Monica J. Casper is Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences and Women's Studies, and Director of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies, at Arizona State University's New College. She is author of
The Making of the Unborn Patient.
Lisa Jean Moore is Professor of Sociology and Womens Studies and Coordinator of Gender Studies at Purchase College, State University of New York. She is author of Sperm Counts: Overcome by Mans Most Precious Fluid and co-author of Missing Bodies: The Politics of Visibility and Buzz: Urban Beekeeping and the Power of the Bee. She is also co-editor of the collection The Body Reader and, with Monica Casper, oversees the series Biopolitics: Medicine, Technoscience, and Health in the Twenty-First Century for NYU Press.