Walter Byers, who served as NCAA executive director from 1951 to 1987, was charged with the dual mission of keeping intercollegiate sports clean while generating millions of dollars each year as income for the colleges. Here Byers exposes, as only he can, the history and present-day state of college athletics: monetary gifts, questionable academic standards, advertising endorsements, legal battles, and the political manipulation of college presidents.
Byers believes that modern-day college sports are no longer a student activity: they are a high-dollar commercial enter-prise, and college...

"Hammer has written a great war novel here, brilliantly informed on munitions and the horrors of close combat. This is a Northern novel, with echoes of Michael Shaara's 'The Killer Angels, ' but it also evokes---in the author's sympathy for poor white Peckerwoods---the bleak cracker comedies of Erskine Caldwell." ---John Mort, Vietnam combat veteran and author of the award-winning novel, "Soldier in Paradise"--- BREAKING SLAVE SHACKLES Black soldiers (and a Peckerwood white boy) free the slaves---that's the thrust of "Emancipating." Opening as Sherman's soldiers win the Battle of Atlanta, the...

What's this about a Death Angel? Recently widowed and quite old, Rosa Lee Rainsburg wants something to happen now, or she wants everything to stop---just STOP. Then it starts happening too fast as she enters a nursing home and meets her first roommate, who dies that very night. Is this another visitation of the sinister Death Angel, whom some residents believe haunts the halls of Hearthstone? Two more deaths follow, and Detective Lieutenant Sterling P. Fjord---elderly himself---comes to investigate. Under suspicion, Rosa Lee endures his interrogation, warding him off in a verbal fencing...

Cheeky Damn Kraut That cheeky damn Kraut followed Ethel home on the streetcar. He was pretty good looking, but woo her as he might, for many months he couldn't win her. Only after he took a beating from her kinfolk, only after she pitched in with a mop handle to rescue him, did he slip into bed with her. They were young then. They lived long together and quarreled a lot. He got sick, and during the next nine months they thought back to good times and bad. Out of wooden matches, Willi had once built a log fort for his stepson on Ethel's bedroom floor, then helped the kid blast it down with...