Bøger af Allen Paul

Twenty years ago, Allen Paul wrote the first post-communist account of one of the greatest but least-known tragedies of the 20th century: Stalin's annihilation of Poland's officer corps and massive deportation of so-called "bourgeoisie elements" to Siberia. Today, these brutal events are symbolized by one word, Katyn--a crime that still bitterly divides Poles and Russians. Paul's richly updated account covers Russian attempts to recant their admission of guilt for the murders in Katyn Forest and includes recently translated documents from Russian military archives, eyewitness accounts of two perpetrators, and secret official minutes published here for the first time that confirm that U.S. government cover-up of the crime continued long after the war ended.Paul's masterful narrative recreates what daily life was like for three Polish families amid momentous events of World War II--from the treacherous Nazi-Soviet invasion in 1939 to a rigged election in 1947 that sealed Poland's doom. The patriarch of each family was among the Polish officers personally ordered by Stalin to be shot. One of the families suffered daily repression under the German General Government. Like thousands of other Poles, two of the families were deported to Siberia, where they nearly died from forced labor, starvation, and neglect. Through painstaking research, the author reconstructs the lives of these families including such stories as a miraculous escape on the last transport of Poles leaving Russia and a mother's daring ski trek over the Carpathian Mountains to rescue a daughter she had not seen in six years. At the heart of the drama is the Poles' uncommon belief in "victory in defeat"--that their struggles made them strong and that freedom and independence, inevitably, would be regained.

In From Honey With Love, Honey-a swamp dog living in the wild-tells her own harrowing story in a charming southern voice. Barely a year old, her high-stakes drama begins when she gets trapped and nearly shot. Convinced that she's a coyote or a "ditch dog," trappers want to wipe out her breed, perhaps the oldest in North America. But Honey gets rescued by Miss Jane and taken to Banbury Cross Farm, where she rescues and raises Honey's breed-the Carolina Dog or American Dingo.At the farm, Honey quickly bonds with Mr. Billy, the Field Master for fox hunters, and Ace, the farm manager. They quickly bond as a pack, like the one Honey left in the swamp.Honey's quickness causes Ace, Miss Jane, and Mr. Billy to train her to become an agility champion. How she runs the race of her life, and how the killers in the swamp get caught, lives in legend. Along the way, Honey learns a lesson she'll never forget: the strength of the wolf is the pack, and the strength of the pack is the wolf.

Impelled by runaway spending and rampant corruption, America's much-beloved games of college basketball and football are being threatened. The specter of billion-dollar sums being showered on coaches, voracious athletic directors, hordes of support staff and lavish comforts for fans has led to a near-deafening roar to pay the players. The injustice of such sums being amassed, in the main, from the labor of young men of color many of whom come from disadvantaged backgrounds cannot be justified; and yet, American society has allowed this intractable problem to fester for more than half a century. Lured by the glitter of untold riches, naive young players enroll year after year in colleges and universities expecting the ultimate reward of a highly paid career as a pro. Only a minuscule few will advance that far; even fewer will reap significant financial rewards. Instead of educating them, colleges and universities force them into full-time athletic jobs in which their labor is shamelessly exploited. Small wonder that outraged critics demand compensation for the players, but these same critics only present vague answers when asked how such a radical change would work. College Sports on the Brink of Disaster, first published as Marching Toward Madness and now newly updated, cites twenty-one reasons why the pro-pay position is wrong, among them the  prospect that the player talent pool will be concentrated to even fewer rich schools; recruiting wars will lead to more frequent scandals; and the regulatory powers of the NCAA will exponentially increase. Worst of all, pay-for-play will encourage schools to shirk even further the imperative to educate the young athletes.College Sports on the Brink of Disaster presents comprehensive reforms to end cheating and corruption in college sports, to put academics first, and to end the peonage of non-white athletes once and for all.