The Dying Beatitude: The Insidious Assault Begins (The DiCaro Family Saga Book 1)

The Dying Beatitude, Book One of The DiCaro Family Saga, focuses on one of the most pressing problems America faces today; the crises within the healthcare delivery system.
John DiCaro, an immigrant baker and family patriarch, the first of four generations, came to America with vivid memories of death and suffering as a boy in Italy. With the impossible dream of becoming a doctor himself, he transfers that dream to his only son, John Jr., now a typical, traditional ‘family doctor’ during the mid-twentieth century. The untimely death of Susan, his wife, sets the stage for the intensification of existing personality aberrations in their youngest child, five-year-old Tommy.
This third generation of the DiCaro family; the sons and daughter of Dr. John and Susan DiCaro, each take a different path in life, but all play a crucial role in shaping the future of medicine in America as it exists today. Oldest son Johnny becomes a physician and joins his father’s practice. Middle child Maria—a state’s attorney and later, a U.S. Congresswoman—is obsessed by the plight of the elderly who in turn refer to her as ‘the senior citizens’ Joan of Arc’. Youngest son, the troubled Tommy, chooses a role which will dramatically impact healthcare; quietly and anonymously assisting HHS in achieving its ever increasing control of healthcare policy and enforcement in America. His marriage to the daughter of a powerful U.S. Senator broadens his base of power and insures his rise to higher levels of control, while maintaining the faceless and invisible form of an omnipotent bureaucrat.
… the oncoming headlights exploded into her eyes like two bright stars with blinding vertical and horizontal lines. The sheer panic lasted only a moment. Realizing the oncoming vehicle was in her lane, coming straight at her, Susan instinctively pulled the steering wheel hard to the right. But it was too late. The red pickup never changed course, hitting the DiCaro car head-on. Susan’s hideous screams of disbelief and pain were dampened by the tearing, screeching sound of metal consuming metal.

Join author Dr. Wilson as he travels with four generations of this Italian-American family while it reaps the bounty of John DiCaro Sr., the bread baker. Witness the good and the bad of medical practice, politics and federal bureaucracy from the 1950s to the early twenty-first century.

Dr. Wilson is a retired family physician who lives with his wife Marilyn, RN, MSW, in Florida.