Homes In Texas Research Articles

Home Equity Lending in Texas: Are Loan Origination Fees Interest?

The constitutional amendment did not define what constituted a fee for purposes of a home equity loan, and this ambiguity has created much concern among lenders. This Comment argues that a loan origination fee charged by a lender in a home equity transaction should be considered interest and not a fee for purposes of the three percent fee limitation. Part II of this Comment will discuss homestead protection in Texas and the 1997 constitutional amendment authorizing home equity lending. Specifically, Part II will discuss the three percent fee limitation, the forfeiture and cure provisions contained in the constitutional amendment, and the problems inherent in interpreting what constitutes a fee for purposes of the cap on fees. Part III will discuss the potential charges to a borrower in a hypothetical home equity transaction by defining and describing the varying lender and non-lender charges. Part IV will discuss how interest and fees have historically been defined under Texas law. Part V will discuss whether the legislature intended a different definition of interest and fees for purposes of the three percent cap on fees. Part V will also examine the language of the pertinent section of the constitutional amendment, applying the rules of statutory construction in Texas, and will discuss how Texas regulatory agencies interpret the amendment. Part VI will discuss four recent judicial interpretations of the constitutional amendment relative to the classification of points and/or origination fees in Texas home equity transactions. Part VI will also discuss a recent decision by the Texas Supreme Court interpreting the cure provision contained in the constitutional amendment and its application to a violation of section 50(a)(6)(E). In addition, Part VI will provide a summary of recent home equity cases. Part VII will discuss the relevant policy considerations in classifying interest and fees for purposes of home equity lending in Texas and lender options for dealing with the problem created by the uncertainty of whether a loan origination fee constitutes interest or a fee. Part VII will also discuss the 2003 amendment to the Texas Constitution on home equity lending, to the extent that the amendment addresses the problem of interpretation and the process by which a lender or note holder may cure a violation of the home equity law. Finally, Part VIII will summarize why loan origination fees should be considered interest and not fees for purposes of home equity lending in Texas.

HOW HUMMINGBIRDS SCALE THE HEIGHTS

How any bird stays aloft seems miraculous, but how hummingbirds manoeuvre like insects is even more astonishing. Yet some species make their homes at altitudes that would make us gasp. The lack of oxygen must compromise the bird's high-level performance, and it's also harder to stay aloft in thin air. But somehow the tiny animals overcome both inconveniences to conquer some of the tallest mountain ranges in America; though `how' wasn't clear, until Douglas Altshuler began hiking through the Peruvian Andes. Filming over 40 species of wild hummingbird as they hovered at heights ranging from 400 m to 4,300 m, Altshuler discovered that at higher altitudes, the tiny birds sweep their wings through wider arcs to stay aloft as the air density drops (p.3139).But working with the agile aeronauts in the Peruvian forest was far from straightforward. Altshuler had to capture the birds in mist nets as they darted through the trees. After six weeks alone in the jungle, Altshuler had only trapped 30. But when he returned a year later, he was accompanied by a team of enthusiastic Earthwatch volunteers; suddenly the project took off. Within a matter of weeks, the volunteers had trapped more birds than Altshuler had caught during the previous field season. Together they collected footage to find out how the birds modulated their wing beats at higher altitudes. Back home in Texas, after hours of painstaking analyses, Altshuler realised that as the height increased and the air quality fell, all of the birds increased their wing beat amplitude to stay aloft.But the Peruvian jungle isn't the most controllable environment. Altshuler needed to systematically alter the atmosphere around a hovering hummingbird and monitor how its wing beats varied to find how they overcome the lack of air.This time he travelled to the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, the transient home of Rufus and broad tailed hummingbirds. After gently trapping the birds,Altshuler placed them in an airtight cylinder, where he could control the atmosphere as the birds hovered. Would the birds increase their wing beat frequency, or wing sweep?First Altshuler decreased the air density while maintaining the oxygen level. As the density fell, both species gained the extra lift they needed in thin air by widening their wing strokes. But how would they react to falling oxygen levels? Altshuler replaced the oxygen with nitrogen, but no matter how hard the birds tried to beat their wings, their wing beat frequencies fell until they `gently drifted down like a feather to the bottom of the chamber'he says. Without oxygen the birds could no longer beat their wings fast enough to hover.But how would ruby-throated hummingbirds hover in thin air where the oxygen level was much higher; 35%? Surprisingly, even with the extra oxygen, the birds couldn't increase their wing beat frequency. They simply increased their wing beat amplitude, just as they had before. What was it that stopped the birds from beating their wings faster? Were the muscles working at their limit, or was something else preventing the birds from raising their performance?Altshuler set the birds a weightlifting challenge to see whether they could ever increase their work output. Fitting them with a hummingbird-sized harness, he videoed the birds as they strained to lift a string of beads. For a fraction of a second, their wing beat frequency rocketed, but quickly fell again. The birds had switched from aerobic respiration to anaerobic respiration. So their muscles could work harder, but only briefly, which is why they resort to sweeping their wings wide while at altitude.

Gideon Lincecum's Sword: Civil War Letters from the Texas Home Front

Compilation of letters written by Gideon Lincecum, a natural scientist and philosopher living in Texas, discussing various events and his experiences during the Civil War as a proponent of the Confederacy. The collection includes editorial notes and commentary. Index starts on page 373.

ADOPTING CHANGE

This article explores the reasons some pregnant women enter maternity homes with the plan to place their babies for adoption. The authors discuss changes in maternity homes over the twentieth century and report on findings from a survey of currently licensed homes in Texas. Next, the authors discuss the findings from fieldwork and in-depth interviews with residents of two maternity homes. They identify three major reasons why birth mothers enter maternity homes: (1) the desire to escape abusive or stressful family lives, (2) the desire to avoid the stigma of placing a child for adoption, and (3) the desire to provide their children, and in some cases themselves, with a stable and loving family life. The authors contend that entering a maternity home with the intention of placing their babies for adoption represents an effort on the part of birth mothers to reconfigure their own, often impoverished family lives.

World on Fire: Companies Buy Out Homes in Texas and Louisiana

World on Fire: Companies Buy Out Homes in Texas and Louisiana

The 56th Evac Hospital: Letters of a WWII Army Doctor (review)

Reviewed by: The 56th Evac Hospital: Letters of a WWII Army Doctor Robert J. T. Joy Lawrence D. Collins. The 56th Evac Hospital: Letters of a WWII Army Doctor. War and the Southwest Series, no. 4. Denton: University of North Texas Press, 1995. xx + 284 pp. Ill. $29.95. The fiftieth anniversary of World War II brought forth the useful memoirs of veterans. Lawrence Collins had been a pharmacist for several years before going to medical school, and had just completed his medical residency at Baylor in 1942 when the Baylor Unit was called to war. The university-based hospital units arose from an idea of George Crile’s in World War I, in which they served as base hospitals. Between the wars certain of these units were maintained and brought on active duty with physicians, nurses, and other personnel. The advantage was a team that knew each other—but this could also be a problem. First Lieutenant Collins, thirty-six years old, began his story in April 1943 as the unit moved overseas to North Africa, where they arrived in May. The book is composed entirely of excerpts from his letters to his wife (with an occasional one to a relative). He wrote nearly every day and has added almost no editorial comments. His constant themes are those of all servicemen abroad in war: the arrival of mail, the food, homesickness, mud, rain, his superiors and unit politics, the concern with rank, and the spastic alternation between periods of incredibly demanding work and the boredom of the lull between battles. He commented on the local inhabitants, the country, the terrain, and an occasional tourist visit, and he always asked about his infant daughter. The hospital followed the Army across North Africa from Casablanca to Bizerte. Collins took care of skin disease cases, met British medical staff and touring consultants, learned how to survive in the field, did a great deal of reading, and offered advice to his wife on managing her home front. He spent most of his professional time in surgery: initially, as an assistant; later, doing minor surgery; and by 1945, doing amputations, major wound debridement, and nonbattle cases—hernias, hemorrhoids, circumcisions, and so on. As a junior officer (finally promoted to captain in November 1943) he rotated in assignment as the hospital workload required—to medical wards, the receiving ward, and sick call—but mostly he did surgery. He was ordered to be the gas gangrene expert, and the survival data on his patients document that he did indeed become an expert at managing these difficult cases. In September 1943 the hospital moved to Italy, after the Salerno landings, and followed the fighting. Heavy combat would send them more than a thousand [End Page 739] patients and a punishing and exhausting workload. The unit moved several times and never seemed to escape the rain. On 27 January 1944 the hospital landed at Anzio. Some of the bitterest fighting of the Italian campaign surged around the constricted Allied beachhead pinned down by fierce German opposition. Three evacuation hospitals were in that crowded area, and all were inadvertently hit by artillery shells and bombs: hospitals were too near legitimate targets and all had patients and medical personnel killed and wounded. The letters from the beachhead are purposefully reassuring, but Collins’s long “after action” letter of 15 April 1944 (pp. 199–208) just after leaving the beachhead is a wonderful description of what it was like to care for hundreds of wounded, to do surgery under fire, to try to sleep in foxholes, and to be hungry and dirty and tired and frightened. In that battle, the hospitals were literally in the front lines—so much so, that patients would desert back to the front, claiming it was safer in combat. After leaving Anzio, the unit followed the Army north to Rome, Bologna, the Gustav Line—a seasoned unit and a seasoned Captain Collins. At the very end of the war and afterward, captured and surrendered German soldiers were the majority of the hospital’s patients. Weary and tired of war, yet justly proud of the accomplishments of his hospital and himself, Collins finally arrived home in Texas...

A passive solar home in texas

This article describes a residential house built to emphasize passive solar energy in a hot humid climate...Texas.

Guilty of negligence?

My husband and I grew up and qualified in England. In 1974 he was invited to join a family practice residency at the University of Western Ontario in Canada. We had planned to stay abroad for two years but we stayed for 15. We worked as family doctors in Canada, New England, and Texas. Many experiences we must have shared with doctors the world over, but some were unique to America. Here is the aftermath of one of them. The jury are locked in the juryroom. We are waiting for their verdict after five and a half years of anguish and anxiety.… She was a thin, pale woman, asthmatic, menopausal, mildly depressed, and angry. She had come to hate her husband. He aggravated her so much. She was making plans to leave him and return to Toronto, but she did not want to leave her nice home in Texas. That day they had another argument. She said that she did not want him around any more. She grabbed her handbag and took the car. The car and she were found along a dirt road not far from home. A map was left open at the wrong place. …

An evaluation of self-certified compliance with minimum standards in regulated family day care homes

The regulation of family day care homes in Texas has relied for many years on registration with self-certification of compliance with minimum standards. A recent random inspection of 20% of regulated family day care homes revealed seriously high noncompliance rates on a number of behaviorally clear and unambiguous standards putting in doubt the efficacy of self-certification in assuring compliance. The use of orientation followed by an inspection visits as a regulatory approach to increase compliance is suggested. Contrary to the idea that inspection programs are intrusive, caregivers in our sample were overwhelmingly positive about the program.

The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane by William Holtz

Reviews 111 This volume is a readable contribution to contemporary literary theory, and an important collection of analyses of Native American literature. SCOTT R. CHRISTIANSON Radford University AllMyRelatives: Community in ContemporaryEthnicAmericanLiteratures. ByBonnie TuSmith. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993. 216 pages, $34.50.) About a decade ago, sociologist Robert Bellah and his associates claimed that Americans have lost the language for expressing communal values. In this ambitious and insightful book, however, Bonnie TuSmith asserts that in the works of ethnic American writers the vision of community is very much alive. Four main chapters deal with the four broad ethnic American groups— Asian American, African American, Native American, and Chicano/a. For each of these groups, TuSmith examines two major writers, one male and one female, whose works appeared after the civil rights movement and who have consciously drawn from their ethnic backgrounds: Frank Chin and Maxine Hong Kingston,John Edgar Wideman and Alice Walker, N. Scott Momaday and Leslie Marmon Silko, Tomás Rivera and Sandra Cisneros. In most cases, the synopses are too brief to help those who are unfamiliar with the works under discussion. And the author rarely deals with such relevant questions as “What do these texts suggest about the community or communities outside their own?”and “How are their visions of their own ethnic communities affected by their attitudes towards the American community as a whole?” TuSmith nonetheless accomplishes important things with this book. Filled with cultural and socio-historical insights, her readings successfully refute ear­ lier misreadings by those who interpreted and evaluated the works from Eurocentric perspectives. Her analysis of the linguistic patterns in each work is exceptionally brilliant. More significant, her courage to cross cultures is inspir­ ing: a first-generation Chinese American who grew up partly in polyracial Manhattan and who teaches multi-ethnic literature at Bowling Green State University, TuSmith has done a pioneering work in exploring the relationships and connections among various ethnic American literatures. SEIWOONG OH Rider College The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane. By William Holtz. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993. 425 pages, $29.95.) This is a thorough and readable biography of a significant figure in twentieth -century western U. S. literature. Rose Wilder Lane (1886-1968), after a 178 WesternAmerican Literature South Dakota and Missouri girlhood, established a New Woman’s career as a real estate salesperson and professional writer. She made a name for herself with celebrity biographies of Jack London, aviator Art Smith, and Herbert Hoover. In the late twenties, she produced several profitable serials and novels, including two (Free Lane and Let the Hurricane Roar) which were based on her family’s experience with Great Plains homesteading. Then, in the late thirties and thereafter, Lane turned increasingly to political writing and theory, becom­ ing the best-known spokesperson for the Libertarian Party. At seventy-nine, Lane travelled to Vietnam to report on the war; she was still active and working when she died at her last home in Texas, in 1968. Holtz has done a meticulous job of telling the story of this complex life. However, this valuable biography is distorted by its undue emphasis on the fact that Lane was the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the well-known “Little House” series. Holtz’s title, his framing of Lane’s story with that of her mother, and his antagonistic account of their uncredited collaboration on the “Little House” books (a story already known to Wilder scholars)—all these suggest his assumption that one must choose sides in the case of the Wilder/ Lane collaboration and that Rose Lane was victimized by her powerful mother. Certainly the story of this mother/daughter collaboration, in which the daughter framed herself as her mother’s teacher, editor and sometime co­ author, is one of the most compelling cases in the history of U. S. women’s authorship. Holtz, who sees himself as Lane’s advocate, doesn’t historicize that story sufficiently; nor does he place it in the contexts of changing ideas about female authorship and traditions of oral storytelling and anonymous collabora­ tion that were important to the nineteenth-century women’s culture in...

Chasing Uncle Charley by Cruce Stark

184 Western American Literature old life was passing away in the Southwest, and make us feel that the issue is not merely of the region, or of the past. KERRYAHEARN Oregon State University Phasing Uncle Charley. By Cruce Stark. (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1992. 369 pages, $17.95.) Cruce Stark’s first novel is set in Texas in the post-Civil War period and it uses events and figures from the old West at the center of many of its episodes, but the reader should check any expectations of consistent realism at the door. The novel is a clever melange of literary types, most centrally picaresque and allegory. It is fast paced, funny, and engaging. The structure is episodic. After a startling and amusing opening sequence, young Bo Johnson finds himself volunteering to leave his secure East Texas home to search for his runaway Uncle Charley. Bo is essentially an American Candide. Naive and mostly passive, he requires a series of guides to lead him toward his elusive and increasingly mysterious Uncle Charley. These guides (from preacher to prostitute, Texas Ranger to Mexican bandit, Big Thicket recluse to Indian cowboy) appear magically at the moment of need. Their voices accumulate in Bo’s head as he progresses toward his goal; indeed Bo’s journey proves to be at least as much an interior as an exterior one. The most striking and entertaining feature of the novel is the technique, related to black humorist tradition, of exploding scenes of comfort or security with sudden and sometimes macabre violence. Stark makes another interesting choice when he opens the novel with a first-person communal voice reporting the events that set Bo’s quest in motion. As Bo then leaves town, the voice acknowledges that it will write henceforth from supposition, and then carries on as a limited-omniscience narrator perched on Bo’s shoulder. This opening does establish a folklore tonality, but perhaps the more significant effect is to remind all of us homebody Telemachus types that we inevitably approach the terrain of Ulysses only through hints and guesses. Similarly, the central point of the novel is to contrast the human sense of a home place with the human longing for freedom, and to unfold in one Ameri­ can Everyman the pulls of these two elements during the last historical period to feature this psychological duality so acutely—the American West in the dynamic rush of the later nineteenth century. On the whole, this first novel is quite entertaining though not up to the hum orous impact of Shrake’s Blessed McGill or the compelling scope of McMurtry’s LonesomeDove. Still, readers who enjoyed those two western winners will find Chasing Uncle Charley a satisfying read. RICHARD MOSELEY West Texas State University ...

FROM EDINBURGH AND TAMBARAM TO HOUSTON: INTERFAITH RELATIONS DOWN HOME IN TEXAS

International Review of MissionVolume 78, Issue 310 p. 187-196 FROM EDINBURGH AND TAMBARAM TO HOUSTON: INTERFAITH RELATIONS DOWN HOME IN TEXAS Edward B. Seeger, Edward B. Seeger Edward B. Seeger is a minister of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and is director of Congregational and Interfaith Relations for Houston Metropolitan Ministries in Texas. As a supplement to this article see “Statement on Proselytism” by the Interfaith Conference of Metropolitan Washington in Documentation section of this issue.Search for more papers by this author Edward B. Seeger, Edward B. Seeger Edward B. Seeger is a minister of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and is director of Congregational and Interfaith Relations for Houston Metropolitan Ministries in Texas. As a supplement to this article see “Statement on Proselytism” by the Interfaith Conference of Metropolitan Washington in Documentation section of this issue.Search for more papers by this author First published: April 1989 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1758-6631.1989.tb03349.x Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume78, Issue310April 1989Pages 187-196 RelatedInformation

<sc>robin w. doughty</sc>. <italic>At Home in Texas: Early Views of the Land</italic>. College Station: Texas A&M University Press. 1987. Pp. viii, 164. $17.95

robin w. doughty. At Home in Texas: Early Views of the Land. College Station: Texas A&M University Press. 1987. Pp. viii, 164. $17.95 Doughty Robin W.. At Home in Texas: Early Views of the Land. College Station: Texas A&M University Press. 1987. Pp. viii, 164. $17.95. Kristine Fredriksson Kristine Fredriksson Traditional Concepts, New Milford, Connecticut Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 93, Issue 5, December 1988, Pages 1396–1397, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/93.5.1396-a Published: 01 December 1988

At Home in Texas: Early Views of the Land

At Home in Texas: Early Views of the Land

At Home in Texas: Early Views of the Land.

At Home in Texas: Early Views of the Land.

At Home in Texas: Early Views of the Land

Journal Article At Home in Texas: Early Views of the Land Get access At Home in Texas: Early Views of the Land. By Doughty Robin W.. (College Station: Texas A & M University Press; 1987. viii + 164 pp. Map, chart, notes, bibliography, index. $17.95.) Nelson Van Valen Nelson Van Valen Beloit College Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Western Historical Quarterly, Volume 19, Issue 3, August 1988, Page 336, https://doi.org/10.2307/968252 Published: 01 August 1988

At Home in Texas: Early Views of the Land by Robin W. Doughty

188 Western American Literature plant collecting and processing, while again considering such topics as the organization of gathering parties, the implements used, principles of owner­ ship, etc. Chapter 5 focuses on foods, including their preparation, dietary content, and menus, as well as food preferences, and foods associated with ritual. Chapter 6, the summary, draws conclusions from the above as to the cul­ tural position of the Western Apache vis a vis their neighbors in the Southwest. Although the volume is principally data oriented, it is well written and should be informative to people with a genuine interest in the cultures, environ­ ment, and environmental concerns of the Western Apache and the peoples of the Southwest. The University of Oklahoma Press should be congratulated for selecting an older but excellent manuscript for publication. CATHERINE S. FOWLER University of Nevada, Reno At Home in Texas: Early Views of the Land. By Robin W. Doughty. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1987. 163 pages, $17.95.) What this geographer-writer strives for in his survey of accounts written by Texas “settlers, chroniclers, and promoters” is both to define sense of place and analyze development of the tie between settler and his new land. Stephen F. Austin, best-known of the early colonizers, foresaw that estab­ lishing a home on the Texas frontier would occur in three stages: clearing, plowing and sowing, and harvesting. The author explores the philosophical implications of these three stages in their effect on the “community-consciousness ” of the settlers. He points out that as the Texas frontier moved westward, settlers began to value wilderness as hunting grounds. Some began to want to preserve the beauty of the woodlands. Others praised the sharp contrasts in Texas terrain and environment as important to their individual feelings of kinship to the land where they chose to build their homes. Research has been thorough for this work, sothat one of the mostvaluable sections of the book for compulsive readers and researchers in Texana is the bibliography. The final chapter, however, “Texas as Home and Place,” may disappoint. In a hurried survey of classic narratives of life in Texas, the author assesses the quality of early Texas women’s lives, the adjustments required of early foreign settlers, the connections between a Texan’s identity and his home place, and the images of Texas depicted in literary works by Texans. To gen­ eralize with confidence on these topics would require considerably more knowl­ edge of Texas’s literary tradition than source citations indicate. Despite the insufficient development of this chapter, however, Professor Doughty realizes his intention “to reconstruct and understand the development of attachment to place by a particular group of people in a specific time and space.” LOU RODENBERGER McMurry College ...

The Western Apache: Living with the Land Before 1950 by Winfred Buskirk

Reviews 187 He interviews medicine men, holy men, and leaders, who explain and enact contemporary rituals which allow one to walk both roads at once. It is not a pretty picture, overall, because few survive, let alone manage the feat of biculturalism. Yet both Lincoln and Slagle (Anglo and Indian) find a measure of success in their joint but separate quests to verify that the native vision of reality must be experienced and institutionalized in all of our lives if we are to warp the black road of technological irresponsibility back to the ecological orientation of aboriginal American ways. Both authors keep an honest, sensitive, and informed sensibility open to the nuances of prairie life. We see the hatred and terror that afflicts Pine Ridge and its neighboring Indian and white communities. But we are also privy to the healing ceremonies that still bind tribal people together, no matter how desperate their situation. This volume, with its idiosyncratic and personalized scholarship, speaks to a wide readership, from serious students of contemporary Indian culture to general readers who sense the connection between native ecological religion and human survival in these American lands. That connection is the good red road of Black Elk’svision. JACK L. DAVIS University of Idaho The Western Apache: Living with the Land Before 1950. By Winfred Buskirk. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986. 273 pages, $22.50.) The Western Apache are well known in the popular and scholarly litera­ ture on the Southwest for their role in making the settling of the region by Anglos an unsettling experience. In this volume, based on anthropological fieldwork in the 1940s, another view is given—that of the relationship of the Western Apache to the land they fought so hard to protect. Often cited in its unpublished form by regional scholars, this slightly revised dissertation, com­ pleted in 1949, should now get the full attention it deserves. The volume treats the ways Western Apache people made a living from their lands from the time of early Spanish/Anglo contacts in 1800 through reservation adjustments to 1950. The work is divided into six chapters, three focused on the details of subsistence, a fourth on the topic of foods, and the two remaining on comparative aspects of Apache lifeways. Chapter 1provides a cultural summary of the Western Apache, particularly the San Carlos Chiricahua - Mescalero group and subgroups. Chapter 2, on agriculture, is rich in original detail on all aspects of plant husbandry, but particularly those related to corn, beans and squash. The role that these crops and their care have played in the daily lives of the people since roughly 1800 is also considered. Chapter 3, on hunting, is equally rich, and treats, in addition to the technology for taking various classes of animals, the methods of training boys to hunt and the spiritual beliefs that guide the system. Chapter 4 provides data on wild 188 Western American Literature plant collecting and processing, while again considering such topics as the organization of gathering parties, the implements used, principles of owner­ ship, etc. Chapter 5 focuses on foods, including their preparation, dietary content, and menus, as well as food preferences, and foods associated with ritual. Chapter 6, the summary, draws conclusions from the above as to the cul­ tural position of the Western Apache vis a vis their neighbors in the Southwest. Although the volume is principally data oriented, it is well written and should be informative to people with a genuine interest in the cultures, environ­ ment, and environmental concerns of the Western Apache and the peoples of the Southwest. The University of Oklahoma Press should be congratulated for selecting an older but excellent manuscript for publication. CATHERINE S. FOWLER University of Nevada, Reno At Home in Texas: Early Views of the Land. By Robin W. Doughty. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1987. 163 pages, $17.95.) What this geographer-writer strives for in his survey of accounts written by Texas “settlers, chroniclers, and promoters” is both to define sense of place and analyze development of the tie between settler and his new land. Stephen F. Austin, best-known of the early colonizers, foresaw that estab­ lishing a home on the Texas...

Borrelia in the Brains of Patients Dying With Dementia

<h3>To the Editor.—</h3> I have identified spirochetes in serial subculture of autopsy brain tissues from two patients with dementia. Indirect immunofluorescence, using monoclonal antibodies specific for<i>Borrelia</i>species, resulted in fluorescence of spirochetes that had previously been identified by darkfield microscope examination (Figs 1 through 4). Case 1 was a 74-year-old woman with mild dementia of less than one year's duration. She had resided in New York and Florida. Case 2 was a 69-year-old man who died in a nursing home in Texas after a four- to five-year history of progressive dementia. Parkinsonian symptoms were noted during his last year of life. Neither patient had symptoms of the skin, joint, or cardiac disorders described in<i>Borrelia burgdorferi</i>infection. Recent reports have described patients with various chronic degenerative neurological disorders whose blood or cerebrospinal fluid contains antibodies against<i>B burgdorferi</i>.¹Individuals with cognitive impairment or memory disorders are found within

Genotoxicity of organic chemicals frequently found in the air of mobile homes

The 19 chemicals most commonly detected in a study of mobile homes in Texas were tested for mutagenicity using a battery of bacterial test strains; the literature was searched to obtain additional information concerning the mutagenicity and carcinogenicity of these chemicals. Formaldehyde was found to be present in 100% of the mobile homes and at the highest mean concentration (167 ppb). The remaining organic chemicals were all present at much lower mean concentrations (less than 10 ppb) and at varying frequencies (2–95%). Of the 19 chemicals tested for mutagenicity, only formaldehyde gave a positive response. A review of the literature revealed that 4 of the chemicals tested, formaldehyde, styrene, tetrachloroethylene and benzene, have been shown to be animal and/or human carcinogens. Thus, formaldehyde is not the only genotoxin present in the air of mobile homes but because it was present in the air of all mobile homes tested at much higher concentrations than the other organic chemicals, formaldehyde should be considered one of the major potential genotoxic hazards present in the air of mobile homes.