Sweeping changes have taken place in many parts of the world in the provision and organization of health care, welfare, and other "public" services. The UK's National Health Service (NHS) has been a prime example of this. This book presents a detailed analysis of these changes, focusing in particular on the management and organization, and strengths and weaknesses of the "contract" culture.

Robert Flynn's second novel tracks a day in the life of Pat Shahan, minister of a Protestant church in a large city. Young, devout, and honest, Shahan seeks revelation--and is offered a revolving neon cross for the church steeple; he seeks vision--and gets a pep talk from the church treasurer. Striving to serve the Lord, he is dragged into a "Great Crusade" which is nothing more than a publicity stunt that ends disastrously. Shahan's day sees him ministering to the sick and dying, pacifying angry parishioners and counseling troubled ones, seeking inspiration for a sermon, trying to calm his...

Hyenas are scavengers and predators. They prey on the weak and the helpless and even their fellow predators, the lions. Like lions, the people in Robert Flynn's stories learn to make accommodations to the hyenas and to a society that tolerates them. Sometimes accommodation is painful, as in "A Boy and His Dog," the story of a Marine and his dog trained to sniff out mines and booby-traps in the Vietnam War.
Sometimes the process of accommodation is comic, bringing out Flynn's characteristic wit, as in "At Play in the Sewers of the Lord," which juxtaposes theology and sewage treatment. But...

What if post-Soviet Union Russia sent biological warfare missiles to the United States, only this time the missiles were animals infected with a virulent form of rickettsia? That's the premise behind this suspense-filled novel from one of Texas' best-known authors.
Hunter Jacob Trace is peacefully trapping mountain lions miles away in the Big Bend when violent turbulence rocks a DC-10 on a cross-Atlantic flight. Just as Trace is unaware of the strange turns his life is about to take, the crew is unaware that three rare Siberian tigers in the hold, being sent to U.S. zoos in Houston, San...

Walt McDonald's A Band of Brothers sheds light on the Vietnam war through the eyes of a pilot in painstaking detail. Walter McDonald's collection is] one of the most moving and insightful accounts of that "dirty little war" I have seen. This is a view of hell from an intelligent, sensitive eye, a tour of unimaginable horror conducted by one who has not only seen it but who has also felt it . Clay Reynolds"