Spain In Our Hearts
The Spanish Civil War dominated news coverage in America and throughout the world for three key years in the 1930s as volunteers descended on Spain to assist its democratic government fend off a fascist revolt led by Francisco Franco and supported by Hitler and Mussolini.
Today, Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls and Robert Capa's images are the primary ways we remember the conflict. A fiery 19-year-old Kentucky woman who went to Spain during the war on her honeymoon, a Swarthmore College student who was the first American fatality in the battle for Madrid, two fiercely partisan, rivalrous New York Times reporters who covered the war from opposite sides, and a swashbuckling Texas oilman with Nazi sympathies are just a few of the less well-known but far more compelling characters Adam Hochschild has discovered.
We may still learn a lot from this fight, which served as the first major engagement of World War II. Adam Hochschild is at his absolute best in Spain in Our Hearts.
