Spain Books

Homage to Catalonia

George Orwell

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 93 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Homage, Take 2: what about Aragon? 4 out of 5 stars.
32 of 33 people found this review helpful.

After re-reading Catalonia, some 20 years after my first encounter, I am disappointed. I do not think that this is Orwell's best work. It has many of his strengths, mainly the elegant, efficient and straightforward prose that he developed so impressively, but there are some flaws. Main flaw in my view is the fact that the main political theme has become dead and irrelevant. Stalin died some decades ago, the Soviet Empire collapsed, we don't need to dig in the little details of their abominable strategies any longer. Of course we can't blame Orwell for the fact that his concerns are not ours any more. But it shows that the book was not timeless in the sense of surviving its immediate subject, as his other non-fiction did.
Second main weakness of the book: the narration of the Barcelona street fighting and the attempts at understanding them are rather boring.
On the strong side: the tales from the Aragon front are much more interesting. Orwell saw less fighting than he was keen to experience, but he describes the trench routine with the same livelyness that he brought to Wigan coalmines and Paris restaurants previously.
He did see enough fighting to get dangerously injured. People said to him that few men survive a shot through the neck, so he was lucky. He thinks he would have been luckier if he had not been shot at all.
Orwell published the book a few months after his adventure, and before the Spanish Civil War was over. Surprisingly the book was a commercial failure then, and equally surprisingly it has later been named as one of the best non-fiction books of the century.
Why was it ignored in the early time? Possibly because he told the world things that the world didn't want to know. He busted the myth that there was a confrontation of the good and the bad in Spain, that democracy fought fashism. Orwell shows us that there were at least 3 camps, not 2. The most vicious fighting that he experienced was among the 'good guys'. The government side was influenced strongly by the communist party who had secured the support from Russia. Since no other country provided weapons to the government side, that secured a lot of mileage.
Orwell was a hopeless romantic, who loved the feeling of working class rule that he got when he first arrived in Barcelona. That must be the reason for the otherwise incomprehensible book title. That basically socialist attitude must also have put quite a few potential readers off at the time of publication.
Orwell later saw the few months in Spain as his political training period. It put him off communism and Stalin for good, but confirmed his socialist attitude, which however never found a political home in a party, though he did support Labor in his remaining years, from the outside.

Editorial Review:

"I wonder what is the appropriate first action when you come from a country at war and set foot on peaceful soil. Mine was to rush to the tobacco-kiosk and buy as many cigars and cigarettes as I could stuff into my pockets." Most war correspondents observe wars and then tell stories about the battles, the soldiers and the civilians. George Orwell--novelist, journalist, sometime socialist--actually traded his press pass for a uniform and fought against Franco's Fascists in the Spanish Civil War during 1936 and 1937. He put his politics and his formidable conscience to the toughest tests during those days in the trenches in the Catalan section of Spain. Then, after nearly getting killed, he went back to England and wrote a gripping account of his experiences, as well as a complex analysis of the political machinations that led to the defeat of the socialist Republicans and the victory of the Fascists.

The Roads to Santiago: The Medieval Pilgrim Routes Through France and Spain to Santiago de Compostela

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Great impressions 4 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

Although you can find books of any kind about the now so popular roads to Santiago, this one adds value by its beautiful pictures and well written impressions that go along them.
Especially, if you didn't take a camera along your own camino, this book is an addition.
It brought quite some memories back to my mind.
And it makes me long for other roads.

Editorial Review:

According to legend, St. James the Apostle preached throughout the Iberian peninsula. His bones found their way to the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela and today many pilgrims make trips to the shrine. This fully illustrated book covers all the routes to this holy place from Paris and Spain. Providing readers with historical context for the routes, it showcases all the stunning monuments and magnificent landscapes along the way.

The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square

Ned Sublette

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Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

New Orleans is the most elusive of American cities. The product of the centuries-long struggle among three mighty empires--France, Spain, and England--and among their respective American colonies and enslaved African peoples, it has always seemed like a foreign port to most Americans, baffled as they are by its complex cultural inheritance.

The World That Made New Orleans offers a new perspective on this insufficiently understood city by telling the remarkable story of New Orleans’s first century--a tale of imperial war, religious conflict, the search for treasure, the spread of slavery, the Cuban connection, the cruel aristocracy of sugar, and the very different revolutions that created the United States and Haiti. It demonstrates that New Orleans already had its own distinct personality at the time of Louisiana’s statehood in 1812. By then, important roots of American music were firmly planted in its urban swamp--especially in the dances at Congo Square, where enslaved Africans and African Americans appeared en masse on Sundays to, as an 1819 visitor to the city put it, “rock the city.”

This book is a logical continuation of Ned Sublette’s previous volume, Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo, which was highly praised for its synthesis of musical, cultural, and political history. Just as that book has become a standard resource on Cuba, so too will The World That Made New Orleans long remain essential for understanding the beautiful and tragic story of this most American of cities.

The Conquest of New Spain (Penguin Classics)

Bernal Diaz del Castillo

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Total reviews: 22 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Great Eyewitness account 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

Diaz was one of the soldiers who accompanied Cortez to invade the Aztec Empire. His account is one of the best we have of the whole affair. It is not written with much bias and was written to discount historical myths after the invasion had taken place. It is very analytical at times and his analysis of what happened is given added authority since he was present at the events. If you want to understand what happened this is a great book to read.

Editorial Review:

Vivid, powerful and absorbing, this is a first-person account of one of the most startling military episodes in history: the overthrow of Montezuma's doomed Aztec Empire by the ruthless Hernan Cortes and his band of adventurers. Bernal Diaz del Castillo, himself a soldier under Cortes, presents a fascinatingly detailed description of the Spanish landing in Mexico in 1520 and their amazement at the city, the exploitation of the natives for gold and other treasures, the expulsion and flight of the Spaniards, their regrouping and eventual capture of the Aztec capital.

Columbus in the Americas (Turning Points in History)

William Least Heat-Moon

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Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

A stirring tale of adventure and tragedy

"They brought balls of spun cotton and parrots and javelins and other little things that it would be tiresome to write down, and they gave everything for anything that was given to them. I was attentive and labored to find out if there was any gold."

With these portentous words, Christopher Columbus described one of his first encounters with Native Americans on the island of Guanahani, which he had named San Salvador and claimed for Spain the day before. In Columbus in the Americas, bestselling author William Least Heat-Moon reveals that Columbus's subsequent dealings with the cultures he encountered not only did considerable immediate harm, but also set the pattern of behavior for those who followed him.

Based on the logbook of Columbus and numerous other firsthand accounts of his four voyages to the New World, this vividly detailed history also examines the strengths and weaknesses of Columbus as a navigator, explorer, and leader. It recounts dramatic events such as the destruction of Fortress Navidad, the very first European settlement in the New World; a pitched battle in northern Panama with the native Guaymi people; and an agonizing year Columbus and his men spent marooned on a narrow spit of land in southern Jamaica.

Filled with stories of triumph and tragedy, courage and villainy, Columbus in the Americas offers a balanced yet unflinching portrait of the most famous and controversial explorer in history.

TURNING POINTS features preeminent writers offering fresh, personal perspectives on the defining events of our time.

The Autobiography of Saint Therese of Lisieux: The Story of a Soul

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Total reviews: 27 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

The Little Flower 5 out of 5 stars.
17 of 17 people found this review helpful.

Therese of Lisieux lived a very sheltered life. As we begin the book she actually seems to be spoiled by her family. Her parents were financially secure and devoutly religious. Therese knew she wanted to be a nun from the age of three. She had bouts of poor health and she suffered the loss of her mother early in her life. And then the sisters she relied on left one by one to join the convent. But she also had security and love from her family. She also had an incredible sense of self-direction.

In her book Saint Therese describes souls as similar to different types of flowers. Some are roses, others lilies, and some like orchids, for example. And all can be equally pleasing to God in their own way, when seeking his role for them. People have different talents and different struggles, but these characteristics do not mean that any type is more valued than the other.

Saint Therese describes the Christian Church as one body, and how she wants to be the heart that loves. She writes frequently of the many ways that God is love. She believed that heaven for her would be to be able to help people on earth after she died. She writes that any sacrifice in daily life can be offered to God, for the conversion of souls, or help of others, whether it is the suffering of an illness or loss, or the performance of a mundane daily chore. Therese also writes much she preferred to speak directly to God as a child when she prayed instead of using formal liturgy.

Editorial Review:

St. Therese wrote this account of her life at the behest of her prioress sister two and a half years before she died. Writing in her cold cell for a short spell each evening, this obscure manuscript was completed just a few short weeks before she expired.

The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939

Antony Beevor

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Total reviews: 43 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Francisco Franco is still dead.... 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

le for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939 by Antony Beevor is a much better book than the first full length book that I read on the Spanish Civil War--The Spanish Republic and the Civil War, 1931-1939 by Gabriel Jackson. Beevor is much more clear in his explanations and much more thorough in his description of the actual war. In defense of Jackson, he spent much of his book examining the pre-war history of the Second Spanish Republic as his title implies.

Beevor starts by setting the stage for the drama to follow. He gives a good thumbnail sketch of the important factions--including the Carlists--followers of a century-old "lost cause" of dynastic struggle for the Spanish throne. Beevor then discusses how bitter partisan battles between the Left and the Right kept spiraling out of control. Most of the parties of the Left--socialist, anarchist, and communist--banded together as The Popular Front to win control of the Cortes (legislature).

The various parties of "the Right" feared that a full blown Marxist revolution was about to occur, a fear that rhetoric from some in the Popular Front didn't calm. The result was a plot by leading generals, along with the Carlists and the Spanish Falange, to mount a coup d'etat. Beevor includes an anecdote about how the Falange ("Phalanx") was formed in a musical comedy theater. Beevor actually contests the idea that the Falange was a fascist party in the same sense as Italian Fascists or Nazis. The German and Italian fascists were populist revolutionaries, but much of the Falange was quite reactionary (in its purest sense). Yet the Falange certainly evolved into something close to its German and Italian counterparts.

In fact, Beevor illustrates how both the Republic and the Nationalists had to manage a coalition of different factions. I don't remember a discussion in Jackson's book about just how Franco managed to outmaneuver other rebel leaders and become the supreme leader for the Nationalist forces and factions. Meanwhile, the anarchists running Catalonia almost started their own civil war with the Republic over the autonomy of Catalonia.

Beevor pulls no punches about the brutality of both sides in the war. He makes the point that the "losers" sort of wrote the story of the Spanish Civil War because Franco's benefactors lost the Second World War. Although the Nationalists certainly engaged in more widespread repression, Beevor does not make any apologies for the Republic--whose secret police were run by the Soviet NKVD. Even more interesting is the fact that the communists maintained their own secret prisons where people freed by the actual courts of the Republic were incarcerated.

So while we're on the subject of the communists, it seems clear to me that, the Republic would have been overthrown by a communist coup had it managed to win the war. Beevor never says it plainly, but the picture he paints leaves no doubts for me. The communists were at the forefront of insisting that the Republic would need a "regular" army rather than just party militias to defend it once the rebellion started. The communists dominated this new "People's Army," especially since they controlled the flow of aid to it. The one Great Power supporting the Republic fully was the Soviet Union. There were numerous anecdotes of unit commanders being forced to join the Communist Party in order to get arms, supplies, and even medical support for their units. And I already mentioned how the NKVD ran the Republic's secret police once the war started.

And this gets us to the subject of foreign aid to the Nationalists. From the start, Italy and Germany were on the side of the Nationalists. The most crucial early aid was in the use of German transport planes to transport the Army of Africa from Morocco into metropolitan Spain. Beevor also brings out facts I never knew before. I have long been fascinated by the Condor Legion, the German military contingent primarily consisted of Luftwaffe personnel. (On both sides of the war, the foreigners ran the air arms.) But who knew that the Germans used their pocket battleships to shell Republican-held coastal towns? And the Italians not only sent three divisions of Fascist Party militia, but they also sent a regular army division.

Speaking of the Army of Africa, it disappears from Jackson's book once the initial drive on Madrid fails to capture the city. So I sort of assumed that it was consumed by the effort, with the survivors going to other units. Wrong. The Army of Africa was reorganized into the Morocco Corps within the elite Army of Maneuver. The Nationalist Army of Maneuver was deployed wherever a major offensive was to be conducted. Jackson's book left out such military details--like why the Madrid offensive failed in 1936. Beevor also discusses the other major decisive battles of the war. He also critiques the generalship of both sides. Although the Nationalists get faint praise, Beevor excoriates the Republican leadership.

One of the amusing and ironic features is how the ultra-Catholic Carlists would fight side by side with the Moorish regulares of the Army of Africa. The regulares were allowed to loot, rape, and pillage on many occasions.

But let us return to the subject of foreign aid. While the Soviet Union supported the Republic, France vacillated. Part of this vacillation was because of British pressure. In Britain and America, the Republic enjoyed popular sympathy. But in the ruling elites, there was suspicion about the far-left nature of the Popular Front government. Franco was also astute enough to "mortgage" Spanish mineral rights and industrial output to secure aid from business interests overseas. Apparently, Franco's logistics were greatly aided by thousands of Ford trucks imported from the U.S.

In a lesson still resonating today, Beevor details some of the tragic farce that was the Non-Intervention Committee. Britain, France, Italy, Germany, and the Soviet Union sat upon it. Officially, there was supposed to be no foreign intervention in Spain. Yet even the parading of Italian POW's didn't sway Britain and France from enforcing the arms embargo. But Britain and France were increasingly more concerned with events in Central Europe as Hitler made his moves against the Rhineland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, etc. In other words, no matter how perfidious the acts of the Axis Powers, the weak and indecisive democracies averted their eyes and refused to act.

Beevor's book finishes with not only a discussion of the ridiculous machinations within the dying Republic, but also how the survivors faired after the collapse of the Republic. Tens of thousands were interned in France. Some key leaders were arrested by the Vichy French Milice or the German Gestapo after the Fall of France--and then turned over to Franco. Some key communists went to the Soviet Union and served there. Apparently, there was a Spanish company in the 2nd Free French Armored Division that led the way in liberating Paris. Beevor also discusses the careful neutrality of Franco in the Second World War. Beevor tries to make the case that Franco wanted to join the Axis, but that his asking price was too high--new Spanish possessions at the expense of the ambitions of Mussolini and vast quantities of military equipment and economic aid. This contradicts other historians who believe that Franco never really wanted to join the Axis but that he coyly strung Hitler along.

All in all, this is a superb work to introduce someone to the Spanish Civil War. It is also excellent for those of us who knew some things, but wanted to learn more. The only real gripe that I have is that all of the maps are up front and not interleaved at the relevant points in the narrative. Otherwise, call this one a 4.5 out of 5 stars in my book.

Editorial Review:

A fresh and acclaimed account of the Spanish Civil War by the bestselling author of Stalingrad and The Fall Of Berlin 1945

To mark the 70th anniversary of the Spanish Civil War’s outbreak, Antony Beevor has written a completely updated and revised account of one of the most bitter and hard-fought wars of the twentieth century. With new material gleaned from the Russian archives and numerous other sources, this brisk and accessible book (Spain’s #1 bestseller for twelve weeks), provides a balanced and penetrating perspective, explaining the tensions that led to this terrible overture to World War II and affording new insights into the war—its causes, course, and consequences.

The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation

Mark Kurlansky

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Total reviews: 78 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The buzz about the Guggenheim Bilbão aside, the Basques seldom get good press--from the 12th-century Codex of Calixtus ("A Basque or Navarrese would do in a French man for a copper coin") to current news items about ETA, the Basque nationalist group. Mark Kurlansky, author of Cod, sets out to change all that in The Basque History of the World.

"The singular remarkable fact about the Basques is that they still exist," Kurlansky asserts. Without a defined country (other than Euskadi, otherwise known as "Basqueland"), with no known related ethnic groups, the Basques are an anomaly in Europe. What unites the Basques, above all, is their language--Euskera. According to ETA, "Euskera is the quintessence of Euskadi. So long as Euskera is alive, Euskadi will live." To help provide a complete picture of the Basques, Kurlansky looks at their political, economic, social, and even culinary history, from the valiant Basque underground in World War II to medieval whalers to modern makers of the gâteau Basque. The most affecting chapter focuses on Guernica, a small market town bombed by German planes for over three hours on April 26, 1937, and uses interviews with survivors to illustrate the horror of the attack.

Kurlansky is clearly enamored of the Basques, which leads him to see them in a uniformly positive light. That rosy outlook aside, The Basque History of the World is an excellent introduction to these romantic people. Are they the original Europeans? Kurlansky doesn't weigh in on the issue, preferring instead to honor the Basque request Garean gareana legez--let us be what we are. --Sunny Delaney

The Mexican Dream: Or, The Interrupted Thought of Amerindian Civilizations

J. M. G. Le Clezio

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Editorial Review:

Winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Literature, J. M. G. Le Clézio here conjures the consciousness of Mexico, powerfully evoking the dreams that made and unmade an ancient culture. Le Clézio’s haunting book takes us into the dream that was the religion of the Aztecs, a religion whose own apocalyptic visions anticipated the coming of the Spanish conquerors. Here the dream of the conquistadores rises before us, too, the glimmering idea of gold drawing Europe into the Mexican dream. Against the religion and thought of the Aztecs and the Tarascans and the Europeans in Mexico, Le Clézio also shows us those of the “barbarians” of the north, the nomadic Indians beyond the pale of the Aztec frontier.

Finally, Le Clézio’s book is a dream of the present, a meditation on what in Amerindian civilizations—in their language, in their way of telling tales, of wanting to survive their own destruction—moved the poet, playwright, and actor Antonin Artaud and motivates Le Clézio in this book. His own deep identification with pre-Columbian cultures, whose faith told them the wheel of time would bring their gods and their beliefs back to them, finds fitting expression in this extraordinary book, which brings the dream around.

“We are lucky to have in Le Clézio a writer of great quality who brings his particular sensibility and talent here to remind us of the very nature of the rituals and myths of the civilizations of ancient Mexico; he provides us with descriptions as precise as they are mysterious.”—Le Figaro

Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830

John H. Elliott

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Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

This epic history compares the empires built by Spain and Britain in the Americas, from Columbus’s arrival in the New World to the end of Spanish colonial rule in the early nineteenth century. J. H. Elliott, one of the most distinguished and versatile historians working today, offers us history on a grand scale, contrasting the worlds built by Britain and by Spain on the ruins of the civilizations they encountered and destroyed in North and South America.
Elliott identifies and explains both the similarities and differences in the two empires’ processes of colonization, the character of their colonial societies, their distinctive styles of imperial government, and the independence movements mounted against them. Based on wide reading in the history of the two great Atlantic civilizations, the book sets the Spanish and British colonial empires in the context of their own times and offers us insights into aspects of this dual history that still influence the Americas.