For about 5 percent of top-division players, college ends with a golden ticket to the NFL or the NBA. Millions of teenagers accept scholarships to chase their dreams of fame and fortune-at the price of absolute submission to the whims of an organizaetion that puts their interests dead last. Fans have begun to realize that the athletes involved in the two biggest college sports, men's baseketball and football, are little more than indentured servants. How can the NCAA blithely wreck careers without regard to due process or common fairness? How can it act so ruthlessly to enforce rules that are so petty? Why won't anybody stand up to these outrageous violations of American values and American justice? In the four years since Joe Nocera asked those quesetions in a controversial New York Times column, the National Collegiate Athletic Association has come under fire. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition.
With the 41st Division in the Southwest Pacific is a powerful, gritty, and moving narrative of the life of a soldier during some of the most difficult fighting of World War II. He was a part of the Japanese occupation force and writes with feeling about living among his former enemies and of the decision to drop the atom bomb. A member of the famed 41st Infantry Brigade, the Jungleers, Catanzaro saw combat at Hollandia, Biak, Zamboanga, and Mindanao. From basic training at Camp Roberts through combat, occupation, and the long journey home, Francis Catanzaro's account tells of the excitement, misery, cruelty, and terror of combat, and of the uneasy boredom of jungle camp life. It takes the reader into the jungles and caves of New Guinea and the Philippines during the long campaign to win the war against Japan. This memoir, written with a simple and direct honesty that is rare indeed, follows a foot soldier's career from basic training to mustering out. We were cut off and surrounded! In the enormous literature of the Second World War, there are surprisingly few accounts of fighting in the southwest Pacific, fewer still by common infantrymen. As we waited, we began to hear heavy fire from the rear. Shortly after that our forward movement stopped, and we heard heavy firing from the head of the column. The first indication of trouble was the roar of heavy artillery shells sailing over our heads. As we moved westward along the road, two of our destroyers were sailing abreast of the lead elements of the advancing column. The road climbed a ridge 15 or 20 feet high and we found ourselves on a flat coral plateau sparsely covered by small trees and scrub growth. e began our advance toward the Mokmer Airstrip.
0 kommentar(er)
