When Dr. Brownes partner retires, his practice is taken over by Dr. Forbes Q. Hazzig, who becomes a zealot for a managed care revolution of marketplace medicine. Browne and his associate Dr. Kennes receive irrational, discordant information from healthcare experts, consultants and economists. Browne learns that rhetoric of a mass movement must be as erroneous as possible promising a vague, glorious future. Hazzig grows immensely rich and gains enormous power relying on intimidation and coercion. Joanna Brownes exhibition of J.M.W. Turner becomes a thrilling success, yet Hazzigs wife succeeds in eliminating Joannas position at East Valley Museum of Art. Joanna must accept a position at a distant university; her absence devastates Browne. Browne and Kennes discover managed care was based on a Washington bureau hoax, the health maintenance strategy of 1973: an irrational mass movement, a mass hysteria. Hazzig plots to humiliate and ruin the two doctors; each threat goes awry. Hazzig is discredited; his illusory wealth collapses. Reunited with Joanna, Dr. Browne receives a disturbing invitation to return to East Valley to be recognized with Dr. Kennes for their efforts to expose the folly of managed care. Browne is reluctant to relive his lonely, troubled, distressed past.

Jean Kendrick, a champion billiard player taught by DeadSTRoke, a grandmaster at billiards, was unable to win on the Women's Professional Billiard Tour: something held her back, and she returned to Rispah Junction. A young charismatic player, Corky, arrives with a beautiful young prostitute, Floppsie. The denizens of the poolroom don't trust Corky who is captivated by Jean. The denizens and Dr. Marek Kendrick try to find the cause of DeadSTRoke's death twelve years prior to beginning of the story. During Tournament Week, Corky and Floppsie mysteriously vanish. Jean's brother Dr. Marek, a physician in practice with Jean's and Marek's father, tries to explain the disappearance of Corky and Floppsie.

Captain Noon is in his last year at college. He sleeps till noon, he dreams of being a pilot. Time and opportunities slip away in procrastination. The narrator, his father, recalls his own fathers instructions, play for keeps, and the head of his high school hoe-out your row. Get on with it. Finish what you do. A distant cousin Nora put off life and never got around to it. A thorn in the side of members of the family, Nora lives alone and has a stroke. She is the family historian collecting clippings about members of the family in her Death Bible. The comfortable Berkeley liberals, a man in an electric wheelchair takes a pitch in the rain, a pitcher for the Giants, neighbors, Berkeleys contraband dog hair, and the fancy of the Triple Z Squadron, the Triple Z Airlines in peacetime, fill out the story. Thomas De Quincey says: If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think of robbing, and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination.

At this book's core is a critical edition of letters exchanged over 50 years between Anglo-Irish composer Elizabeth Maconchy (1907-1994) and the Welsh composer Grace Williams (1906-1977). These two innovative and talented women are highly regarded for their music, their professional activities and their roles in British musical life. The edition comprises around 200 letters from 1927 to 1977, none of which have been published before, along with scholarly introductions and contextualizations. Interwoven commentaries, in tandem with carefully constructed appendices, frame the letter texts. Moreover, the commentaries and introductory essays highlight and track the development of important themes and issues that characterize the study of twentieth-century British music today. This edition presents a dialogue, through both sides of a unique correspondence, offering an alternative commentary on musical and cultural developments of this period.