Wertheimer's idea is to describe the various ways in which insurance and “underwriting” operated in the United States to control fear and establish personal and corporate authority. He focusses on individuals but attempts, where possible, to relate them to their wider philosophical, economic and technological context. The insurance business has a lesser place in the book than the subtitle implies and underwriting is frequently used as a metaphor.

Wertheimer's writing style is sometimes unappealing or irritating (for example, he prefers “literalist” to “literal” (25)). Alleged but not readily demonstrated irony is never far from hand, and many sentences are simply opaque or ungraceful. He often dwells in the literary and philosophical style known as post-structuralism – this might be unwelcoming to, for example, an insurance broker curious about the history of insurance who has not been numbed by a literature or history course on “theory.”

A perhaps more serious worry arises in Wertheimer's announcement that in its questions and answers “this book urges critical incongruities, placing great confidence in the idea that monetary and literary representations … can signify mutually defining actual and physical worlds” (9). This “urging” and “confidence” sound to this reviewer like no more than nervous adolescent cockiness and stubbornness. But the reader need not worry. Does it really matter if the connection between literature, insurance and personal security is not always coherent in individuals and society? Rather than fretting, we can enjoy a series of city breaks: Philadelphia, to hear of Mr. Franklin's fear and about chess as a metaphor for controlling it (this chapter includes much that will not be familiar to everybody); to Boston for Phyllis Wheatley's attempts to escape loss and death by salvation (the most forced chapter – Wertheimer is anxious to say that religion is incidental to fear in Wheatley's poetry when his own evidence suggests it is integral); Hartford for Noah Webster's “Foundations” of charitable cooperatives, legal certainty in contracts and copyright and cultural and linguistic surety in the Dictionary (the passage on the Dictionary is easily the most fascinating in the book and has made this reviewer go, at last, deeper into H. L. Mencken than the Prejudices); New York and Herman Melville (the chapter most apt for expansion); and Boston again, for a discussion of Emerson's essay “Self-Reliance.”

This book has an attractive olive green and red cover. It is probably too expensive to attract many buyers outside of institutions.