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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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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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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La Batalla Del Jarama, by Jesús González de Miguel, and Los Internacionales: English Speaking Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, edited by Antonio R. Celada, Manuel González de la Aleja, and Daniel Pastor García.
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Max Aub was a novelist and playwright of remarkable originality who spent his live chronicling the conflict that had torn his country apart and catapulted him into exile. Almost forty years after his death, Verso has published Field of Honour, the first of Aub's 6-volume Civil War cycle.
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The Madrid-based Flamenco group Noche Flamenca celebrated its 16th season in New York with a a riveting, emotional tribute to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. “ALBA” begins with a passionate lament expressed by two guitars and two male voices, Manuel Gago (tenor) and Miguel Rosendo (baritone). The dancers enter the low-lit stage led by...
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Read British journalist David Eade's article on recent revelations about illicit adoptions of babies by Francoist families:
In wider Spain during the Franco era it has been established that children were indeed taken from their parents without their knowledge and passed on to an adoptive family. It is reported Judge Baltasar...
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An anonymous short story just posted on the Experience Project:
He was from London and unemployed in the mid 1930’s and feeling ever more bolshevik by the day – so, he signed up to go to Spain and fight Franco and Hitler – and that Mussolini person. … My grandfather worked in an engineering factory...
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Ronan Bennett, writing in the Guardian to lament the demise of the UK Film Council, fondly recalls a recent documentary project based on the memoirs of Stuart Christie, the legendary Anarchist bookseller (with the world's best SCW film website), who in 1963 helped conspire to kill the victor of the...
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Gilberto Bosques (1892-1995), the Mexican diplomat who saved thousands of lives of anti-fascist European refugees in the wake of the Spanish Civil War and the outbreak of World War II, has been honored with the opening of his own museum in Puebla, La Jornada reports. Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas appointed Bosques consul to...
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The Spanish labor party (PSOE) has denounced the removal of plaques commemorating the victims of executions from the walls of the cemetery of Granada, Europa Press reports. The plaques have been removed by the Granada city government, run by the conservative Partido Popular (PP), The plaques had been put up a couple of days earlier, at...
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In an interview with a Spanish gossip magazine, Louis de Bourbon, the pretender to the French throne, defends the legacy of Francisco Franco, who also happens to be his great-grandfather, Expatica reports. More here (in Spanish).
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Yesterday marked the successful conclusion of ALBA’s second week-long high-school teachers institute in Tampa, Florida, led by Professors Fraser Ottanelli, Peter Carroll, and Roberto Alicea. (Brochure here.) Sherman Dorn, who has lent his expertise on state standards to help out with the institute, reflects on his experience in his blog:
We’ve had some wonderful classroom...
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Maclean's, Canada's only weekly current affairs magazine, has a piece on Garzón this week, by Katie Engelhart:
But while he is now “opening wounds in his own country,” says Reed Brody of Human Rights Watch, Garzón has long been at the vanguard of international criminal prosecutions. “He’s a reference point...
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The trailer was just released for There Be Dragons, a new film by Roland Joffé (The Mission, The Killing Fields), the narrative of which starts out during the Spanish Civil War, as the movie's Facebook page explains:
There Be Dragons is an epic action-adventure-romance set during the turmoil of...
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The International Center of Photography is working full-speed to prepare for a major exhibit with images from the so-called "Mexican Suitcase"--the long-considered-lost negative archive of Spanish Civil War photographs by Robert Capa, David "Chim" Seymour, and Gerda Taro. Scheduled to open on September 24, the exhibit is already attracting media attention, witness the...
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ALBA's project to provide a complete list of the more than 2,800 individuals who left from U.S. territory to fight with the Spanish Republic