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Dan Floyd, a retired and widowed lawyer, is doing his best to fill his timeattending church, keeping in touch with his two adult sons, and reading up on epidemics. When he comes down with what seems like garden-variety flu, he amuses himself by studying plagues, both modern-day varieties and the biblical kind. Dan and his sons, one of whom is a doctor, share information and speculate about epidemics. Meanwhile, in the community around him, he begins to hear of people dying from complications brought on by the flumany of whom attend his church. Dan soon finds himself investigating members of the Starkherz family, three generations of doctors; it seems the Starkherzes were working with the H1N1 influenza virusthe source of the flu epidemic of 19181919in an attempt to neutralize it. Could their work serve as the source for a twenty-first-century flu pandemic? In this novel, a retired lawyer works with his sons to discover the source of a deadly influenza epidemic that threatens their lives and the lives of everyone around them.

Near the end of his life, Roger Williams, Rhode Island founder and father of American religious freedom, scrawled an encrypted essay in the margins of a colonial-era book. For more than 300 years those shorthand notes remained indecipherable......until a team of Brown University undergraduates led by Lucas Mason-Brown cracked Williams'code after the marginalia languished for over a century in the archives of the John Carter Brown Library. At the time of Williams'writing, a trans-Atlantic debate on infant versus believer's baptism had taken shape that included London Baptist minister John Norcott and the famous Puritan'Apostle to the Indians,'John Eliot. Amazingly, Williams'code contained a previously undiscovered essay, which was a point-by-point refutation of Eliot's book supporting infant baptism.History professors Linford D. Fisher and J. Stanley Lemons immediately recognized the importance of what turned out to be theologian Roger Williams'final treatise. Decoding Roger Williams reveals for the first time Williams'translated and annotated essay, along with a critical essay by Fisher, Lemons, and Mason-Brown and reprints of the original Norcott and Eliot tracts.

Objects that make the past feel real, from a stone axe head to a piece of John Brown's scaffold—includes photos. History isn't just about abstract “isms”—it's the story of real events that happened to real people. In Touching America's History, Meredith Mason Brown uses a collection of such objects, drawing from his own family's heirlooms, to summon up major developments in America's history. The objects range in date from a Pequot stone axe head, probably made before the Pequot War in 1637, to the western novel Dwight Eisenhower was reading while waiting for the weather to clear so the Normandy Invasion could begin, to a piece of a toilet bowl found in the bombed-out wreckage of Hitler's home in 1945. Among the other historically evocative items are a Kentucky rifle carried by Col. John Floyd, killed by Indians in 1783; a letter from George Washington explaining why he will not be able to attend the Constitutional Convention; shavings from the scaffold on which John Brown was hanged; a pistol belonging to Gen. William Preston, in whose arms Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston bled to death after being shot at the Battle of Shiloh; and the records of a court-martial for the killing by an American officer of a Filipino captive during the Philippine War. Together, these objects call to mind nothing less than the birth, growth, and shaping of what is now America. “Clearly written, buttressed by maps and portraits, Brown's book regales while showing the objectivity and nuance of a historian.”—Library Journal “A whole new way of doing history…a novel form of story-telling.”—Joseph J. Ellis, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation

The name Daniel Boone conjures up the image of an illiterate, coonskin cap-wearing patriot who settled Kentucky and killed countless Indians. The scarcity of surviving autobiographical material has allowed tellers of his story to fashion a Boone of their own liking, and his myth has evolved in countless stories, biographies, novels, poems, and paintings. In this welcome book, Meredith Mason Brown separates the real Daniel Boone from the many fables that surround him, revealing a man far more complex -- and far more interesting -- than his legend.Brown traces Boone's life from his Pennsylvania childhood to his experiences in the militia and his rise as an unexcelled woodsman, explorer, and backcountry leader. In the process, we meet the authentic Boone: he didn't wear coonskin caps; he read and wrote better than many frontiersmen; he was not the first to settle Kentucky; he took no pleasure in killing Indians. At once a loner and a leader, a Quaker who became a skilled frontier fighter, Boone is a study in contradictions. Devoted to his wife and children, he nevertheless embarked on long hunts that could keep him from home for two years or more. A captain in colonial Virginia's militia, Boone later fought against the British and their Indian allies in the Revolutionary War before he moved to Missouri when it was still Spanish territory and became a Spanish civil servant. Boone did indeed kill Indians during the bloody fighting for Kentucky, but he also respected Indians, became the adopted son of a Shawnee chief, and formed lasting friendships with many Shawnees who once held him captive.During Boone's lifetime (1734--1820), America evolved from a group of colonies with fewer than a million inhabitants clustered along the Atlantic Coast to an independent nation of close to ten million reaching well beyond the Mississippi River. Frontiersman is the first biography to explore Boone's crucial role in that transformation. Hundreds of thousands of settlers entered Kentucky on the road that Boone and his axemen blazed from the Cumberland Gap to the Kentucky River. Boone's leadership in the defense of Boonesborough during a sustained Indian attack in 1778 was instrumental in preventing white settlers from fleeing Kentucky during the bloody years of the Revolution. And Boone's move to Missouri in 1799 and his exploration up the Missouri River helped encourage a flood of settlers into that region. Through his colorful chronicle of Boone's experiences, Brown paints a rich portrayal of colonial and Revolutionary America, the relations between whites and Indians, the opening and settling of the Old West, and the birth of the American national identity. Supported with copious maps, illustrations, endnotes, and a detailed chronology of Boone's life, Frontiersman provides a fresh and accurate rendering of a man most people know only as a folk hero -- and of the nation that has mythologized him for over two centuries.

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Reading Rehab Hospital has experimented with a popular concept in health care--patient-focused care--intended to increase quality and reduce costs by organizing care delivery around particular diagnoses or'service lines,'rather than around the functions or disciplines of the care providers. It is equivalent to a product rather than a process focus. Unfortunately, it is not clear whether the benefits of this new healthcare model are sufficient to compensate for the drawbacks.

Finally, a book for guys that solves the riddles of pregnancy. Do you think that newborn babies can eat Doritos? That they can't scream very loudly since they just have tiny little baby lungs? That you will still be able to golf on weekends after your baby is born? If so, you need this book! Breathe takes guys misstep-by-misstep through the stages of pregnancy and the early days of childhood. Considered by many to be the unofficial pregnancy handbook of the NBA, Breathe is filled with useful tips such as these: Brown's First Law of Conception: The odds of conception are inversely proportional to its desirability. High school virgins experimenting behind bleachers are guaranteed to get pregnant; financially secure married men hoping for children are doomed to spend their weekends in fertility clinics masturbating into cups. Picking a doctor: Never use a gynecologist whose Medical School Diploma has palm trees on the side. Pre-Natal Music: Mozart, yes. Wagner, No! Common Concerns: If your baby is born with dark hair that covers its head, back, neck, temples and forehead, don't panic. This is perfectly normal. It just means your baby was born Italian. Child experts from all over the world agree -- if you're a first time father, drop your baby and pick up this book!

Who Cut the Cheese? uses a delightful little fable to encapsulate the fundamental rule of modern American management and the new economy:'Survive change by shifting blame.'The fable revolves around two malevolent rats and two spiteful'Punypeople'who find themselves trapped together in a maze, fighting over a dwindling supply of constantly moving cheese. Some characters adapt readily to this treacherous, shifting environment -- blaming the weak and overpowering the helpless. Others perish in horror, praying for death. Read this book and live! Written for all ages, the story can be understood by even the youngest reader: The'maze'is a metaphor for life, and the'cheese'is a metaphor for whatever you desire in life -- be it worldly goods, spiritual well-being, or unspeakable sexual encounters too deviant even for the Internet. The more advanced reader will also understand the secondary message of the book:'Resistance is futile.'As soon as change happens, we must accept it immediately or suffer the consequences. This heavy-handed lesson is designed to engender unquestioning obedience to authority, and makes the book an ideal gift for subordinates. Large companies would be well advised to give this book to each and every one of their employees, especially if they are considering a restructuring to bolster shareholder value. Extremely short, even including illustrations, the story takes less than an hour to read, but its unsettling conclusions on the nature of humanity should last a lifetime!

Reading Rehab Hospital has experimented with a popular new concept in health care--patient-focused care--intended to increase quality and reduce costs by organizing care delivery around particular diagnoses or'service lines,'rather than around the functions or disciplines of the care providers. It is equivalent to product rather than process focus. Rehabilitation involves multiple disciplines which must share information about their evaluations of the patient, about planned treatments, and about patient progress. The decisions and actions of one care provider depend on those of another. This case illustrates the effects of a problem fundamental to service operations--variable demand and the limitations of organizing production by service lines under conditions of uncertain demand, due to the loss of pooling. Finally, its methods, for achieving the coordination benefits of service lines under conditions where the level or stability of demand is insufficient to justify the use of service lines.