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The 35th postgraduate assembly of south Texas produced a handsome written monument in this collection of medical essays representing the "Houston Group's" approach to acute medical problems. Most of the "crises" confronting the primary care physician are covered and several of the chapters are as concise and well written as anything in current literature. I particularly liked Fischer's concepts of cause of and therapy for the contused lung, and I believe that Bart's section on hemorrhagic emergencies is as clear and to the point as might be wished, despite poor reproduction of his charts. The section on coma is outstanding, bringing many diverse presentations together into a helpful and literate treatise. As usual, the psychiatry section is long on evaluation and short on therapy, but the main criticism of this book—and others like it—lies in the great difficulty of presenting a subject such as the "acute abdomen" without making the