Hell and Good Company: The Spanish Civil War and the World It Made

Historian Rhodes (who won a Pulitzer Prize for 1986’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb) combines numerous memoirs to provide a ground-level view of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). The struggle between Republicans and Franco-led Nationalists was brutal: “fully half a million died directly, or from hunger and disease, or immediately afterward in Franco’s hundred thousand vindictive executions.” Rhodes follows the fighting, showing that the Republicans were doomed by Nazi Germany and fascist Italy’s intervention on Franco’s side, which led to the carpet bombing of Guernica (inspiring Picasso’s painting) and elsewhere. Meanwhile, Britain and France kept their distance, and the U.S.S.R. withdrew its support for the Republicans toward the war’s end. Rhodes profiles medical volunteers and writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, André Malraux, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and New York Times correspondent Herbert Matthews. Aside from some medical innovations, such as new concepts of battlefield triage, Rhodes never specifies how the war changed the world, but he does offer a vivid look at how the desperate struggle appeared to participants. [em]Agent: Anne Sibbald, Janklow & Nesbit. (Feb.) [/em]