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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Grace Under Pressure: The Life of Evan Shipman. By Sean O’Rourke. Harwood Publishing and Unlimited Publishing, 2011. “I owe Spain a great deal,” Evan Shipman wrote to his good friend Ernest Hemingway on his return from Spain in June 1938. Shipman’s road to war followed a unique path that was influenced by the novelist. He...
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Quaker Relief Work in the Spanish Civil War. By Farah Mendlesohn. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2002. During the Spanish Civil War, in the face of the enormous civilian suffering, a number of non-governmental international organizations stepped in to perform relief work. Many of these supported one side of the conflict or the other;...
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Al servicio de la República. Diplomáticos y guerra civil. Edited by Ángel Viñas. Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2010. Diplomats are funny creatures. On the one hand, they embody an anachronistic kind of superficiality—all form, protocol, and etiquette. On the other, they are influential actors behind the scenes, no less devious or powerful than spies and...
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Luis Buñuel: The Red Years, 1929-1939, due to be published next month with the University of Wisconsin Press (excerpt, order), reveals scores of unknown facts about the life and work of Luis Buñuel during a crucial decade not only in the filmmaker’s life but in the history of film and photography—as well...
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(Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2008) Review published in American Studies, Vol 50, Nos 3/4, Fall/Winter, 2009. This is an impressive piece of scholarship, which combines admirable bibliographic and archival research with clear, engaging prose.  Throughout the book’s five main chapters, Schreiber painstakingly reconstructs the biographical and artistic trajectories of a talented and diverse...
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Unearthing Franco’s Legacy: Mass Graves and the Recovery of Historical Memory in Spain. Ed. Carlos Jerez-Farrán and Samuel Amago. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. (Buy at Powell's and support ALBA) In the past 10 years, organizations both in Spain and abroad have vindicated the need to honor victims of the...
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Written in Red: The Communist Memoir in Spain. By Gina Herrmann. University of Illinois Press, 2010. Written in Red analyzes the life writing of six Spanish Communists: Dolores Ibárurri, Jorge Semprún, Rafael Alberti, María Teresa León, Teresa Pàmies and Tomás Pàmies. Notwithstanding significant stylistic and political differences, their writing shares a preoccupation with the personal...
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Angel Viñas's trilogy on the Republic constitutes, without a doubt, the most detailed and fully documented archival studies of the international diplomatic and military reactions to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War; and also of the efforts of the successive Republican governments to overcome the politico-economic hostility of the major democratic powers—England, France,...
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