"On a balmy October afternoon in 1971 I found myself on my back on a street in South San Francisco, my left shoulder blade pinned to the curb. I had tripped...(and) there was a lanky young man with an unsettling ferocity in his eyes standing over me, pointing a handgun at my face..." a physician's memoir of life and death and jousting with metaphorical windmills in these turbulent times.