Reviews

Book Review: Franco’s crimes against Humanity

September 18, 2011
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Book Review: Franco’s crimes against Humanity

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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Book Review: Lives of the Left

June 17, 2011
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Book Review: Lives of the Left

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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Ángel Viñas’s Masterly Historical Trilogy

March 4, 2011
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Ángel Viñas’s Masterly Historical Trilogy

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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Presidential Politics in Republican Spain

March 4, 2011
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Presidential Politics in Republican Spain

Juan Negrín y López, the “enigmatic” leader of the Spanish Republic from May 1937 until its defeat in March 1939, has not been treated kindly in many histories of the Civil War. Some attacks have been personal, with critics scoffing at his “lavish spending…his delight in pretty women and his gargantuan eating and drinking.”...
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Cercas’ book on the 1981 coup reviewed

February 8, 2011
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Cercas’ book on the 1981 coup reviewed

Anne Chisholm, in this Sunday's Telegraph, and Michael Eaude, in the Independent, review Javier Cercas' Anatomy of a Moment, a prize-winning fictionalized history of the failed February 1981 coup:

The Anatomy of a Moment is extensively researched, rigorous with the facts. It is not only history, though, for where...
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Fraser reviews Casanova’s Republic & SCW

February 8, 2011
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Fraser reviews Casanova’s Republic & SCW

Ronald Fraser, author of the pathbreaking oral history Blood of Spain, reviews Julián Casanova's newly translated The Spanish Republic and Civil War (Cambridge, 2010) in the most recent issue of the New Left Review:

The belief that the Spanish Civil War can essentially be reduced to a struggle...
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Book Reviews: Spain’s legacy in Britain

November 23, 2010
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Book Reviews: Spain’s legacy in Britain

Looking Back at the Spanish Civil War is a collection of the first 10 Len Crome annual lectures sponsored by the IBMT. Antifascistas is more of a picture book designed to accompany a traveling exhibition honoring the role of British and Irish volunteers in Spain. 
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Geek Novel Back in Print

June 1, 2010
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Geek Novel Back in Print

Nightmare Alley by William Lindsay Gresham. Introduction by Nick Tosches. New York Review of Books/paperback. On his way out of Spain in 1938, Bill Gresham, a Baltimore-born volunteer in the John Brown Artillery company of the International Brigades, heard a strange story from one of his comrades, Joseph “Doc” Halliday, about an alcoholic carnival...
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Book Review: The Spanish Right and the Jews

June 1, 2010
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Book Review: The Spanish Right and the Jews

Isabelle Rohr, The Spanish Right and the Jews, 1898-1945: Anti-Semitism and Opportunism, Brighton/Portland Sussex University Press, 2008. This is an intriguing study of the relationship mostly of the Spanish Right, but also until the post-Franco years, of the Spanish state itself, with its own Jews, so to speak, the Sephardic community. It hearkens back...
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Cecil Eby reviewed

March 18, 2010
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Cecil Eby reviewed

I receive a steady flow of requests for a copy of my review of Cecil D. Eby's book Comrades and Commissars: The Lincoln Battalion in the Spanish Civil War. I thought readers of this blog might want to see it. Click here to read it in pdf.
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