Sometimes the two spheres collide, as was the case with Spragins’s ““Choosing and Using an HMO’’ (272 pages. Bloomberg Press). Spragins joined NEWSWEEK in May 1994 to cover consumer issues for the magazine’s new FOCUS ON YOUR MONEY section, just around the time health-care reform became a dinner-table topic of conversation. ““Covering health-care issues for NEWSWEEK made me realize how underserved consumers were,’’ she says. Spragins says the book, a practical guide to judging the quality of HMOs, is designed to demystify health plans in the age of managed care.
Award-winning personal-finance journalist Jane Bryant Quinn has been unraveling the intricacies of financial arcana such as IPO announcements and insurance law for 19 years in her NEWSWEEK column, now called ““Capital Gains.’’ Quinn’s new book, ““Making the Most of Your Money’’ (1,066 pages. Simon & Schuster), updates her 1991 best seller, a how-to guide to managing and investing your dollars. ““It’s a complete rewrite,’’ she says, adding that the tax bill passed this summer forced her to go to the mat on the book’s deadline. ““There were so many changes that affected things I had written,’’ Quinn says. ““Suddenly good ideas were not such good ideas anymore.’’ The book is now in stores; Quinn is recuperating from the final frenzy by taking in an 11-city signing tour.
Senior Writer David Gates knows from publishing snafus. Over the summer the truck transporting the manuscript of his new, second novel, ““Preston Falls’’ (368 pages. Knopf), crashed on the way to the printing press and went up in flames. ““There was no copy,’’ he says, noting that the driver escaped without injury. The culmination of six years of writing incinerated, Gates had to reconstruct three months of final revisions, all of which had been scribbled in the margins by hand. ““I was very angry and panicked, and [so] I took it out on the weak spots in the book,’’ says Gates, whose first novel, ““Jernigan,’’ was a finalist for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize. He adds that working at NEWSWEEK has taught him a thing or two about dealing with adversity under pressure. Some things, though, don’t carry over from novel writing to journalism. For example? ““Like making up stuff that’s not true.''
