Spain in Our Hearts: Americans the Spanish Civil War, 1936 1939

The remarkable story of the American volunteers who fought in the Spanish Civil War. `With all due respect to Orwell, Spain in Our Hearts should supplant Homage to Catalonia as the best introduction to the conflict written in English’ New Republic For three crucial years in the 1930s, volunteers flooded to Spain to help its democratic government fight off a Fascist uprising led by Francisco Franco and aided by Hitler and Mussolini. The Spanish Civil War was the century’s first modern, total war, but it was soon overshadowed by the world war that it helped introduce. Today it is mostly remembered through classic accounts from Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell, and in Robert Capa’s photographs. But in Spain in Our Hearts, Adam Hochschild presents equally compelling, if less well-known, characters and weaves their stories together to reveal the full tragedy and importance of the war. `Hochschild’s contribution lies in the storytelling, his sure command of military history, and his beautiful sense of private hurt . . . effortlessly hopscotches from global history to individual – and emotional – experience’ Guardian `Hochschild tells nuanced tales of political awakenings and disillusionments, but also steadfast ethical commitment. He never descends into easy moralizing . . . Spanish Civil War history is a minefield but Hochschild has entered it sure-footedly’ BBC History Magazine From the moment it began in 1936, the Spanish Civil War became the political question of the age. Hitler and Mussolini quickly sent aircraft, troops and supplies to the right-wing generals bent on overthrowing Spain's elected government. Millions of people around the world felt passionately that rapidly advancing fascism must be halted in Spain; if not there, where? More than 35,000 volunteers from dozens of other countries went to help defend the Spanish Republic.Adam Hochschild, the acclaimed author of King Leopold's Ghost, evokes this tumultuous period mainly through the lives of Americans involved in the war. A few are famous, such as Ernest Hemingway, but others are less familiar. They include a nineteen-year-old Kentucky woman, a fiery leftist who came to wartime Spain on her honeymoon; a young man who ran away from his Pennsylvania college and became the first American casualty in the battle for Madrid; and a swashbuckling Texas oilman who covertly violated US law and sold Generalissimo Francisco Franco most of the fuel for his army. Two New York Times reporters, fierce rivals, covered the war from opposite sides, with opposite sympathies. There are Britons in Hochschild's cast of characters as well: one, a London sculptor, fought with the American battalion; another, who had just gone down from Cambridge, joined Franco's army and found himself fighting against the Americans; and a third is someone whose experience of combat in Spain had a profound effect on his life, George Orwell.