Once again, Lathen takes her ideas from the headlines of the financial pages — here, they are airline deregulation and employee-run corporations.

One need only recall the brief career of People Express airlines in the mid 1980s to see how "realistic" Lathen's portrait of Sparrow Flyways is. In fact, these issues still remain in the world of business, and small airlines constantly appear, endanger the giants, then disappear, and one of the major U.S. carriers was recently bought out by its employees. The issue of drug money financing also recurs with regularity.

1. Discuss the characters of Eleanor Gough and Phoebe Fournier as representatives of women in the modern work force. Do they differ significantly from the male characters in terms of how and why they operate? How do the male characters below and above them in the hierarchy of power deal with them?

2. Examine Mitch...