Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 - Hardcover

From the acclaimed, best-selling author Adam Hochschild, a sweeping history of the Spanish Civil War told through a dozen unforgettable characters: a tale of idealism, suffering, and a tragically doomed yet noble cause

For three crucial years in the 1930s, the Spanish Civil War dominated headlines in America and around the world, as volunteers flooded to Spain to help its democratic government fight off a Fascist uprising led by Francisco Franco and aided by Hitler and Mussolini. It was the century’s first modern, total war, but it was soon overshadowed by the world war that it helped introduce. Today it is mostly remembered through just a few classic accounts: Ernest Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, George Orwell’s memoirs, Robert Capa’s photographs. But in Spain in Our Hearts, Adam Hochschild presents equally compelling characters and weaves their stories together to reveal the full tragedy and importance of the war.

Through the eyes of Lois Orr, a fiery nineteen-year-old Kentucky woman whose honeymoon in wartime Spain turned into an extended stay, we experience the blossoming of Barcelona as a workers’ utopia, before its dark descent into Stalinist purges. We meet a Swarthmore College senior who was the first American casualty in the battle for Madrid; a pair of fiercely partisan, rivalrous New York Times reporters who covered the war from opposite sides; and a swashbuckling Texas oilman with Nazi sympathies who sold Franco almost all his oil—at reduced prices, and on credit. At the center of Hochschild’s account is an American couple, widely admired on the war’s front lines, and their inspiring, heartbreaking love story.

The Spanish Civil War was in many was the opening battle of World War II, and we still have much to learn from it. Spain in Our Hearts is Adam Hochschild at his very best.
 

“Few writers grapple so powerfully with the painful moral and ethical choices of past actors as does Hochschild, who brings to Spain in Our Hearts his exceptional talents—and his moral seriousness—as a reporter, as a historian, and as a writer.” — Jill Lepore, author of The Secret History of Wonder Woman

“Hochschild’s account of the David-and-Goliath fight between the ragtag army of idealistic, pro-democracy volunteers and the mechanized, murderous forces of Franco, Hitler, and Mussolini is one of the most powerful narratives I have ever read.” — Lynne Olson, author of Citizens of London

“Spain in Our Hearts is narrative nonfiction at its very best. Hochschild’s achievement is to make this trial-by-combat story come alive as if it were happening now. It is impossible for a reader not to identify and feel compassion for those sons and daughters of America who risked and often gave their lives for a cause that could not ultimately prevail. Intensely, unforgettably moving.” — Nigel Hamilton, author of The Mantle of Command

“Hochschild’s poignant narrative evokes E. L. Doctorow’s great historical novel Ragtime—but Spain in Our Hearts is no novel. It is a tragic, true story about a critical tipping point in the twentieth century’s slide into total warfare. Passionate, evocative, and gracefully written.” — Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Good Spy

“Beautifully written with a hawk eye for the telling anecdote, Spain in Our Hearts constitutes an endlessly fascinating and utterly unputdownable survey of the war to defend democracy in Spain that was not only the first act of the Second World War but also, for many across the world, the last great cause.” — Paul Preston, author of The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution, and Revenge