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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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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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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