Richard Dean Smith – författare

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.

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.