Spains Long Shadow

Download or read book Spain's Long Shadow written by María DeGuzmán and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reveals the dependence of American ethnic identity on Spain and Spanish imperialism.

Download or read book The War and Its Shadow written by Helen Graham and published by Apollo Books. This book was released on 2012 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Spain today, its civil war remains 'the past that will not pass away.' The long shadow of World War II also brings back to central focus its most disquieting aspects, revealing to a broader public the stark truth already known by specialist historians - that in Spain, as in the many other internecine wars that would soon convulse Europe, war was waged predominantly upon civilians: millions were killed, not by invaders and strangers, but by their own compatriots, including their own neighbors. Across the continent, Hitler's war of territorial expansion after 1938 would detonate a myriad 'irregular wars' of culture, as well as of politics, which took on a 'cleansing' intransigence, as those driving them sought to make 'homogeneous' communities, whether ethnic, political, or religious. So much of this was prefigured with primal intensity in Spain in 1936, where, on July 17-18, a group of army officers rebelled against the socially-reforming Republic. Saved from almost certain failure by Nazi and Fascist military intervention, and by a British inaction amounting to complicity, these army rebels unleashed a conflict in which civilians became the targets of mass killing. The new military authorities authorized and presided over an extermination of those sectors associated with Republican change, especially those who symbolized cultural change and thus posed a threat to old ways of being and thinking: progressive teachers, self-educated workers, 'new' women. In the Republican zone, resistance to the coup also led to the murder of civilians. This extrajudicial and communal killing in both zones would fundamentally make new political and cultural meanings that changed Spain's political landscape forever. The War and Its Shadow explores the origins, nature, and long-term consequences of this exterminatory war in Spain, charting the resonant forms of political, social, and cultural resistance to it and the memory/legacy these have left behind in Europe and beyond. Not least is our growing sense of the enormity of what, in greater European terms, the Republican war effort resisted: Nazi adventurism and the continent-wide wars of ethnic and political 'purification' it would unleash.

Download or read book The Age of Disenchantments written by Aaron Shulman and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2019-03-05 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An intriguing narrative of literary ambition and family dysfunction—betrayal, drug addiction, and madness—that begins during the Spanish Civil War.” —Amanda Vaill, The New York Times Book Review In this absorbing and atmospheric historical narrative, journalist Aaron Shulman takes us deeply into the circumstances surrounding the Spanish Civil War through the lives, loves, and poetry of the Paneros, Spain’s most compelling and eccentric family, whose lives intersected memorably with many of the most storied figures in the art, literature, and politics of the time—from Neruda to Salvador Dalí, from Ava Gardner to Pablo Picasso to Roberto Bolaño. Weaving memoir with cultural history and biography, and brought together with vivid storytelling and striking images, The Age of Disenchantments sheds new light on the romance and intellectual ferment of the era while revealing the profound and enduring devastation of the war, the Franco dictatorship, and the country’s transition to democracy. A searing tale of love and hatred, art and ambition, and freedom and oppression, The Age of Disenchantments is a chronicle of a family who modeled their lives (and deaths) on the works of art that most inspired and obsessed them and who, in turn, profoundly affected the culture and society around them. “A valuable primer on the ways literature intertwined with politics during Franco’s reign.” —Rigoberto González, Los Angeles Times “In this sweeping, ambitious debut, journalist Shulman offers a group biography of a family indelibly marked by the Spanish Civil War . . . Prodigiously researched and beautifully written.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Download or read book The Shadow of the Wind written by Carlos Ruiz Zafon and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2005-01-25 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times bestseller “The Shadow of the Wind is ultimately a love letter to literature, intended for readers as passionate about storytelling as its young hero.” —Entertainment Weekly (Editor's Choice) “One gorgeous read.” —Stephen King Barcelona, 1945: A city slowly heals in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, and Daniel, an antiquarian book dealer’s son who mourns the loss of his mother, finds solace in a mysterious book entitled The Shadow of the Wind, by one Julián Carax. But when he sets out to find the author’s other works, he makes a shocking discovery: someone has been systematically destroying every copy of every book Carax has written. In fact, Daniel may have the last of Carax’s books in existence. Soon Daniel’s seemingly innocent quest opens a door into one of Barcelona’s darkest secrets--an epic story of murder, madness, and doomed love.

Download or read book Hitler's Shadow Empire written by Pierpaolo Barbieri and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pitting fascists and communists in a showdown for supremacy, the Spanish Civil War has long been seen as a grim dress rehearsal for World War II. Francisco Franco’s Nationalists prevailed with German and Italian military assistance—a clear instance, it seemed, of like-minded regimes joining forces in the fight against global Bolshevism. In Hitler’s Shadow Empire Pierpaolo Barbieri revises this standard account of Axis intervention in the Spanish Civil War, arguing that economic ambitions—not ideology—drove Hitler’s Iberian intervention. The Nazis hoped to establish an economic empire in Europe, and in Spain they tested the tactics intended for future subject territories. “The Spanish Civil War is among the 20th-century military conflicts about which the most continues to be published...Hitler’s Shadow Empire is one of few recent studies offering fresh information, specifically describing German trade in the Franco-controlled zone. While it is typically assumed that Nazi Germany, like Stalinist Russia, became involved in the Spanish Civil War for ideological reasons, Pierpaolo Barbieri, an economic analyst, shows that the motives of the two main powers were quite different. —Stephen Schwartz, Weekly Standard

Download or read book Opium’s Long Shadow written by Steffen Rimner and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-12 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The League of Nations Advisory Committee on the Traffic in Opium and Other Dangerous Drugs, created in 1920, culminated almost eight decades of political turmoil over opium trafficking, which was by far the largest state-backed drug trade in the age of empire. Opponents of opium had long struggled to rein in the profitable drug. Opium’s Long Shadow shows how diverse local protests crossed imperial, national, and colonial boundaries to gain traction globally and harness public opinion as a moral deterrent in international politics after World War I. Steffen Rimner traces the far-flung itineraries and trenchant arguments of reformers—significantly, feminists and journalists—who viewed opium addiction as a root cause of poverty, famine, “white slavery,” and moral degradation. These activists targeted the international reputation of drug-trading governments, first and foremost Great Britain, British India, and Japan, becoming pioneers of the global political tactic we today call naming and shaming. But rather than taking sole responsibility for their own behavior, states in turn appropriated anti-drug criticism to shame fellow sovereigns around the globe. Consequently, participation in drug control became a prerequisite for membership in the twentieth-century international community. Rimner relates how an aggressive embrace of anti-drug politics earned China and other Asian states new influence on the world stage. The link between drug control and international legitimacy has endured. Amid fierce contemporary debate over the wisdom of narcotics policies, the 100-year-old moral consensus Rimner describes remains a backbone of the international order.

Download or read book Like a Fading Shadow written by Antonio Muñoz Molina and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2017-07-18 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A hypnotic novel intertwining the author’s past with James Earl Ray’s attempt to escape after shooting Martin Luther King Jr. The year is 1968 and James Earl Ray has just shot Martin Luther King Jr. For two months he evades authorities, driving to Canada, securing a fake passport, and flying to London, all while relishing the media’s confusion about his location and his image on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. Eventually he lands at the Hotel Portugal in Lisbon, where he anxiously awaits a visa to Angola. But the visa never comes, and for his last ten days of freedom, Ray walks around Lisbon, paying for his pleasures and rehearsing his fake identities. Using recently declassified FBI files, Antonio Muñoz Molina reconstructs Ray’s final steps through the Portuguese capital, taking us inside his feverish mind, troubled past, and infamous crime. But Lisbon is also the city that inspired Muñoz Molina’s first novel, A Winter in Lisbon, and as he returns now, thirty years later, it becomes the stage for and witness to three alternating stories: Ray in 1968 at the center of an international manhunt; a thirty-year-old Muñoz Molina in 1987 struggling to find his literary voice; and the author in the present, reflecting on his life and the form of the novel as an instrument for imagining the world through another person’s eyes. Part historical fiction, part fictional memoir, Like a Fading Shadow masterfully explores the borders between the imagined, the reported, and the experienced past in the construction of identity.