Europe, Military 

Dust jacket notes: "Between June 1973 and May 1975, in the twilight of the Franco era, Ronald Fraser taped his conversations with more than three hundred survivors of Spain's civil war. It was a privileged moment for capturing memories of a period distant enough to be history, yet near enough to be vividly remembered by participants on all sides: merchants and workers, landowners and laborers, communists, socialist, anarchists, monarchists, Falangists, soldiers, priests, and church-burners. Fraser's unrivaled mastery of the writing of oral history has given us a work which, like his earlier In Hiding, sustains a spellbinding momentum. His extraordinary gift for letting people speak their thoughts makes this book vibrantly alive with real people, but it captures especially the essence of the Spanish Civil War - a total war which catastrophically and inexorably reached and politicized everyone, killed members of every family, and devastated homes, livelihoods, and lives. Forty years after, the Spanish Civil War remains a haunting presence. The monstrous ferocity of this fratricidal struggle, the violence it has done to faith, belief, human dignity, and life itself, continue to stagger the imagination. It is the crowning achievement of this book that it reveals with stunning subtleness and clarity why the great issues like land reform and religion splintered Spanish society into incompatible groups who clung to their separate truths in a desperate struggle for human and spiritual survival. It is an overpowering remembrance of one of the most wrenching events of our century." - from Amzon