Some say soccer is politics and others consider it poetry. Jimmy Burns and Simon Kuper lay bare the connections between what happened on the European fields and the world around them.
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At worst, Hemingway & Gellhorn is the best bad movie you'll see all year. It has two stars--Nicole Kidman and Clive Owens--at the top of their game and the chemistry between them incandesces. There’s a great supporting cast too: David Strathairn as the crushable John Dos Passos; Tony Shalhoub as Mikhail Koltsov, the Stalinist...
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Patience Darton’s life is an encapsulation of some of the 20th century’s most critical moments. Without an ounce of didacticism, her life shows the reader the abiding truth of “the personal is political.” No didacticism then, just a truth rendered with grace and melancholy (wrenching understatement is Patience’s forte) and delivered in a way...
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Smith, Richard K. and R. Cargill Hall.  Five Down, No Glory:  Frank G. Tinker, Mercenary Ace in the Spanish Civil War.  Naval Institute Press.  Oct. 2011.  377 pp.  illus.  Timeline.  Notes. index.  ISBN 978-1-61251-054-5.  $36.95. (Buy at Powells and support ALBA.) The reader will note from Five Down, No Glory’s introduction that this study...
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Julian Bell: From Bloomsbury to the Spanish Civil War. By Peter Stansky and William Abrahams. Stanford University Press, 2012. (Buy at Powells and support ALBA.) In 1966, Peter Stansky and William Abrahams published Journey to the Frontier, which followed the lives of two young poets from families with strong intellectual and artistic backgrounds, both...
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Names matter. Paul Preston’s choice of The Spanish Holocaust, his latest and most ambitious account of the massive violence unleashed in the wake of the 1936 coup, is as polemical as it is well-pondered. It reflects a conscious attempt on Preston’s part to reframe how we think about the war in Spain and its...
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Hell No: Your Right to Dissent in Twenty-First Century America, by Michael Ratner and Margaret Ratner Kunstler. The New Press, 2011. (Buy.) Somewhere lurking in our imaginations we carry a picture of ourselves responding to a rap at the door to be bullied by agents of the FBI.  Fantasy is nurtured by films like...
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The Last to Fall, The Life and Letters of Ivor Hickman – an International Brigadier in Spain, by John L. Wainwright’s. Hatchet Green Publishing, 2012. From the cover photograph, of the International Brigade volunteer’s weather-beaten face to the closing lines of "The Last to Fall, The Life and Letters of Ivor Hickman – an International Brigadier...
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Fugitive from Spanish Fascism. A Memoir. By Miguel Domínguez Soler. Translated and with an Introduction by Richard Baker. Cornerstone Press, 2010. Miguel Domínguez Soler, a young Spanish Socialist worker, committed to republican and democratic ideals, had to flee his hometown of Huelva at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936, after the...
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Giles Tremlett, correspondent of The Guardian in Madrid, and author of Ghosts of Spain, reviews Paul Preston’s latest book about terrorism and its legacy in Franco’s Spain. “Franco had time to impose his own version of history, which still prevents contemporary Spain from “looking upon its recent violent past in an open and honest...
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