George Orwell wrote a book on the Spanish Civil War?
The George Orwell? I didn't know that. And he was a participant--as a
Marxist? There are some real holes in my knowledge that, until now, I didn't know existed.
Students of history will know the Spanish Civil War to be a trial run for World War II for Hitler and the Germans. They supported the Fascists under Franco. The Germans had an opportunity to try out their new weapons, and test new battle doctrines and tactics. And people got to observe savagery and inhumanity by the Germans that would characterize much of their actions in that War. Their brutality in the bombing of the Spanish town of Guernica was immortalized in a famous painting by Pablo Picasso with the title of "Guernica."
This should be a fascinating read for several different reasons.
Homage to Catalonia. By George Orwell. Rated 4 1/2 stars, from 242 reviews. Print list price $14.95; digital $14.95; Kindle price now
$1.99. Mariner Books, publisher. 304 pages.
http://www.amazon.com/Homage-Catalon...e+to+Catalonia.
Book Description
A National Review
Top Ten Best Nonfiction Books of the Century
“One of Orwell’s very best books and perhaps the best book that exists on the Spanish Civil War.”—The New Yorker
In 1936, originally intending merely to report on the Spanish Civil War as a journalist, George Orwell found himself embroiled as a participant—as a member of the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unity. Fighting against the Fascists, he described in painfully vivid and occasionally comic detail life in the trenches—with a “democratic army” composed of men with no ranks, no titles, and often no weapons—and his near fatal wounding. As the politics became tangled, Orwell was pulled into a heartbreaking conflict between his own personal ideals and the complicated realities of political power struggles.
Considered one of the finest works by a man V. S. Pritchett called “the wintry conscience of a generation,” Homage to Catalonia is both Orwell’s memoir of his experiences at the front and his tribute to those who died in what he called a fight for common decency. This edition features a new foreword by Adam Hochschild placing the war in greater context and discussing the evolution of Orwell’s views on the Spanish Civil War.