Coming Of The Spanish Civil War

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. A sweeping history of the Spanish Civil War, told through a dozen characters, including Hemingway and George Orwell: A tale of idealism, heartbreaking suffering, and a noble cause that failed. For three crucial years in the 1930s, the Spanish Civil War dominated headlines in America and around the world, as volunteers flooded to Spain to help its democratic government fight off a fascist uprising led by Francisco Franco and aided by Hitler and Mussolini. Today we're accustomed to remembering the war through Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and Robert Capa’s photographs. But Adam Hochschild has discovered some less familiar yet far more compelling characters who reveal the full tragedy and importance of the war: a fiery nineteen-year-old Kentucky woman who went to wartime Spain on her honeymoon, a Swarthmore College senior who was the first American casualty in the battle for Madrid, a pair of fiercely partisan, rivalrous New York Times reporters who covered the war from opposites sides, and a swashbuckling Texas oilman with Nazi sympathies who sold Franco almost all his oil — at reduced prices, and on credit. It was in many ways the opening battle of World War II, and we still have much to learn from it. Spain in Our Hearts is Adam Hochschild at his very best. “With all due respect to Orwell, Spain in Our Hearts should supplant Homage to Catalonia as the best introduction to the conflict written in English. A humane and moving book."—New Republic “Excellent and involving . . . What makes [Hochschild’s] book so intimate and moving is its human scale.” — Dwight Garner, New York Times

In July 1936, an army-led coup against the democratically elected republican government ushered in the Spanish Civil War. Father Alexander J. McCabe was rector of the Irish College in Salamanca when General Francisco Franco seized power a few months later and established his GHQ in the medieval city. McCabe recorded the arrival of the nationalist war machine in his diaries, vividly documenting the horror of the repression and his encounters with Franco, Nazi officers and diplomats, British and American spies and journalists, and adventurers and charlatans from around the world who flocked to Salamanca. He also observed the implosion of General Eoin O’Duffy’s ill-fated Irish Brigade, first as one of its chaplains and later mediating between the nationalist high command and O’Duffy. He unsuccessfully attempted to dissuade a disillusioned O’Duffy from returning to Ireland with the Irish Brigade in 1937. Historian Tim Fanning uses McCabe’s diaries to provide a fascinating account of life in Spain before, during and after the war, as well as McCabe’s memories of growing up in Ireland at a time of momentous change. This is the troubling and enthralling story of an eyewitness to one of the most tragic episodes in twentieth-century European history.

This classic text is made newly available in a substantially revised and updated second edition.

Celebrated historian Richard Rhodes explores the Spanish Civil War through the stories of the reporters, writers, artists and doctorswho witnessed it The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) engaged an extraordinary number of exceptional artists and writers: Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, Martha Gellhorn, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, John Dos Passos, to name only a few. The idealism of the cause - defending democracy from fascism at a time when Europe was darkening toward another world war - and the brutality of the conflict drew from them some of their best work: Guernica, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Homage to Catalonia. Paralleling the outpouring of writing and art, the war spurred breakthroughs in military and medical technology. So many different countries participated directly or indirectly in the war that Time magazine called it the 'Little World War'; Spain served in those years as a proving ground for the devastating technologies of World War II, and for the entire 20th century.

“Mr. Thomas has understood [the Spanish Civil War] incredibly well and has written it superbly. A full, vivid and deeply serious treatment of a great subject.”—Vincent Sheean, The New York Times Book Review A masterpiece of the historian’s art, Hugh Thomas’s The Spanish Civil War remains the best, most engrossing narrative of one of the most emblematic and misunderstood wars of the twentieth century. Revised and updated with significant new material, including new revelations about atrocities perpetrated against civilians by both sides in this epic conflict, this “definitive work on the subject” (Richard Bernstein, The New York Times) has been given a fresh face forty years after its initial publication in 1961. In brilliant, moving detail, Thomas analyzes a devastating conflict in which the hopes, dreams, and dogmas of a century exploded onto the battlefield. Like no other account, The Spanish Civil War dramatically reassembles the events that led a European nation, in a continent on the brink of world war, to divide against itself, bringing into play the machinations of Franco and Hitler, the bloodshed of Guernica, and the deeply inspiring heroics of those who rallied to the side of democracy. Communists, anarchists, monarchists, fascists, socialists, democrats -- the various forces of the Spanish Civil War composed a fabric of the twentieth century itself, and Thomas masterfully weaves the diffuse and fascinating threads of the war together in a manner that has established the book as a genuine classic of modern history. “Stands without rivals as the most balanced and comprehensive book on the subject.”—American Historical Review