McGuire and Anderson bring the findings of the behavioral biology of group cooperation to bear on the vexatious problem of healthcare reform. One of the few certainties that we have is that the approach of the last 50 years--arguments between advocates of government or private insurance--has led to intractable gridlock. It is thus necessary to ask whether the initial assumptions buried within this controversy might have fatal flaws. In the authors' views, they do. Our modern society would never tolerate funding of any other necessity or convenience by such clumsy methods. In short, McGuire and Anderson contend we must pay for healthcare the way we pay for food, housing, clothing, and transportation.

McGuire and Anderson begin by examining the flaws embedded in each side of the current debate. They offer ten postulates around which any successful system must be devised, and identify the problems from the perspective of patients, professionals, and public and private insurance providers. Finally, they apply the knowledge of the biology of human behavior to the problem of enhancing group cooperation toward a self-correcting system, which avoids the current major pitfalls. A workable system, they contend, will be one that is compatible with human nature; not a perfect system, but better than we have, and more likely to work than competing theoretical constructs.

Appointed is a recently recovered novel written by William Anderson and Walter Stowers, two of the editors of the Detroit Plaindealer, a long-running and well-regarded African American newspaper of the late nineteenth century. Drawing heavily on nineteenth-century print culture, the authors tell the story of John Saunders, a college-educated black man living and working in Detroit. Through a bizarre Set of circumstances, Saunders befriends his white employer's son, Seth Stanley, and the two men form a lasting, cross-racial bond that leads them to travel together to the American South. On their journey, John shows Seth the harsh realities of American racism and instructs him in how he might take responsibility for alleviating the effects of racism in his own home and in the white world broadly. As a coauthored novel of frustrated ambition, cross-racial friendship, and the tragedy of lynching, Appointed represents a unique contribution to African American literary history. This is the first scholarly edition of Appointed, and it includes a collection of writings from the Plaindealer, the authors' short story "A Strange Freak of Fate", and an introduction that locates Appointed and its authors within the journalistic and literary currents of the United States in the late nineteenth century.

Appointed is a recently recovered novel written by William Anderson and Walter Stowers, two of the editors of the Detroit Plaindealer, a long-running and well-regarded African American newspaper of the late nineteenth century. Drawing heavily on nineteenth-century print culture, the authors tell the story of John Saunders, a college-educated black man living and working in Detroit. Through a bizarre Set of circumstances, Saunders befriends his white employer's son, Seth Stanley, and the two men form a lasting, cross-racial bond that leads them to travel together to the American South. On their journey, John shows Seth the harsh realities of American racism and instructs him in how he might take responsibility for alleviating the effects of racism in his own home and in the white world broadly. As a coauthored novel of frustrated ambition, cross-racial friendship, and the tragedy of lynching, Appointed represents a unique contribution to African American literary history. This is the first scholarly edition of Appointed, and it includes a collection of writings from the Plaindealer, the authors' short story "A Strange Freak of Fate", and an introduction that locates Appointed and its authors within the journalistic and literary currents of the United States in the late nineteenth century.