Böcker av Peter Lucas

RUMPALLA, RUMMAGING THROUGH ALBANIA is a newspaperman's book. In it Lucas not only writes about his experiences traveling throughout the then-closed, tightly -controlled Communist country in the late 1980s, but he tells the story through the eyes of a reporter. In 1986 he became the first Americana reporter to be allowed into the country in thirty years. Returning again and again, Lucas chronicled the changes the country went through as it broke away from the hard line Communism of Joseph Stalin to join the rest of the nations of Europe as a fledging democracy. In between, the writer found time to search for the site of a World War II American plane crash, find his father's abandoned village, trace the High Albania footsteps of early English traveler Edith Durham, and help Kosovar refugees during the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia. In between, searching for the heart of Albania, he got to know and interview Albanian peasants and presidents.

Describes how the team of OSS (Office of Strategic Services) agents aided the Communist-led Partisans in an attempt to weaken the Nazi cause in Albania and neighboring Italy. This book also looks at the small core of hardened men who comprised these teams, including each member's background and his fitness for his wartime role behind enemy lines.

We are facing a future of unbounded complexity. Whether that complexity is harnessed to build a world that is safe, pleasant, humane and profitable, or whether it causes us to careen off a cliff into an abyss of mind-numbing junk is an open question.