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John Sayles’ new novel reviewed

June 10, 2011
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John Sayles’ new novel reviewed

A Moment in the Sun, the monumental new historical novel by ALBA board member John Sayles, is praised by Tom LeClair in this weekend's Times book review:

“A Moment in the Sun” is, it should be said, nearly 1,000 pages long. Sayles responds to readers’ presumed resentment against its bulk (a resentment...
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More on “DBE-gate”

June 9, 2011
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More on “DBE-gate”

The uproar continues around Diccionario Biográfico Español, whose first 25 volumes were released last week by the Royal Academy of History, as the Spanish Parliament is demanding a thorough revision. The Financial Times covers the controversy; and I joined in on a collective op-ed that appeared yesterday in Público:

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The New Yorker on Garzón

June 9, 2011
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The New Yorker on Garzón

The New Yorker's Dan Kaufman had lunch with Baltasar Garzón when he was in New York in May to receive the first ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism:

“My family on my father’s side was more progressive, while on my mother’s side they were more conservative,” Garzón said. His mother’s brother, Gabriel,...
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More Lincoln History on the Spanish Blog “FronteraD”

June 7, 2011
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More Lincoln History on the Spanish Blog “FronteraD”

A lovely evocation, in video and prose, of Harold Meloffsky, Ernie Arion, and Bernie Abramofsky (Aibel) by Spanish journalist Pablo Mediavilla, marred only by a gratuitous and puzzling swipe at NYU students.  Historical irony:  the recipient of most of the letters on which these evocations were based, was Miriam Sigel, mother of the NYU...
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Archive of the week: Archivo Rojo

June 5, 2011
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Archive of the week: Archivo Rojo

The amount of archival materials related to the Spanish Civil War that are being made available online keeps growing. The Archivo Rojo, managed by the Spanish Ministry of Culture, provides a stunning number of photographs (more than 3,000)  gathered by the Junta Delegada de Defensa de Madrid to denounce the atrocities committed by...
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Shouts of the Hostage’s Hostage: ¡Democracia Real Ya!

June 3, 2011
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Shouts of the Hostage’s Hostage: ¡Democracia Real Ya!

Today I’d like to share with you my honest understanding of what has been going on in Spain over the last few weeks.  It’s not easy to make sense of what’s going on; the mainstream Spanish press, in my opinion, has been getting things quite wrong, or else ignoring the situation, except in its...
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Preston’s “Spanish Holocaust” reviewed

June 3, 2011
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Preston’s “Spanish Holocaust” reviewed

A "relentlessly harrowing read": that is how Nick Lyne characterizes The Spanish Holocaust, Paul Preston's new book on the repression during and after the Spanish Civil War, which was published in Spanish earlier this year and is due out in the UK next spring:

provides, page after page, factual, documentary accounts...
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Neruda’s death investigated

June 3, 2011
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Shortly after the exhumation of Chilean President Salvador Allende, whose long-assumed suicide has now been called into question, the Communist Party of Chile has called for an investigation into the death of Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda, who also died in 1973, alleging that he may have been poisoned. The BBC reports that...
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Guernica, Hiroshima and wartime architecture

June 3, 2011
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Guernica, Hiroshima and wartime architecture

Nicolai Ouroussoff reviews a fascinating exhibit in Montreal on architecture during World War II, which "opens with two images — one depicting the half-crumbled ruins of Guernica after the April 1937 Nazi terror bombings, the other showing two women wandering across the wasteland of Hiroshima, umbrellas in hand, on a wet day sometime...
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The Hidden Heroes of America

June 3, 2011
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Anna Grau, the New York correspondent for the Spanish newspaper ABC, has written a long, moving, and thoroughly researched tribute to the Lincoln Brigade in the online magazine FronteraD, with profiles of Bill Bailey, Alvah Bessie, and John Leopold Simon, and interviews with ALBA's James Fernández and Gabriel Jackson. Read the whole article (in...
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