The Spanish Civil War

Rating:
Summary: A Masterpiece
Review: An epic work on an epic subject. This is a superb text, alive, rivetting and awash with historical details and facts. I cannot see how it can be surpassed. Hugh Thomas has produced what is surely destined to be the definitive work on this tragic and heroic conflict. How the follies and foibles of man can lead to conflict and win or lose it.

A definite must-read!

Rating:
Summary: real history book
Review: excellent history book, a lot of details. The political reasons underlying the fight inside the republicans are very well described and analysed.

Rating:
Summary: Ole!
Review: Hugh Thomas performs one of the most amazing feats in modern, historical writing - he retains a sense of balance and proportion, while narrating one of the most violent and violently partisan wars in history.

I praise this book highly. It is clearly and economically written. The chapters are organized tightly and chronologically with accurate maps reflecting the geography, military lines, and march of events. In my opinion, many histories fail on this score - being dry, confusing and overly footnoted. Not to mention the incomprehensible maps. (I recently read one where north and south were reversed!)

The main players of both sides, their motivations, strategies and problems, are well and fairly explained. One might wish for more war anecdotage but that would probably have overstretched Thomas's mission. In addition to the wealth of fact, Thomas concludes his book with a memorably elegant and moving burst of prose, quite at variance with the previous, clinical narrative. It stands out well.

Independent of your politics, after reading this book you will come away with a good grasp of what the Spanish Civil War was about.



Rating:
Summary: Years no pasarán for this classic
Review: Hugh Thomas succeeds in presenting the complexity of the Spanish Civil War in a single tome. He has included the proper amount of background to the conflict to allow the reader to gain an in-depth understanding of this very miss-understood war. Thomas mixes the right amount of statistics and personality in this very readable comprehensive history. This is the yardstick against which other chronicles of the SCW should be measured.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent history of a complex conflict
Review: I very much enjoyed reading Hugh Thomas' work. He does and excellent job of sorting out the many and varied groups on both the left and the right who struggled for power during this terrible conflict.

In addition, I learned many things about the war that I never knew previously. For example, I was unaware as the extent of the persecution of the Roman Catholic Church in Spain during the war. Given that Spain is overwhelmingly Catholic I assumed the church passed thru the war relatively unscathed. How wrong I was.

Mr. Thomas paints a factual yet horrifying picture of how the so-called "republicans" who were in fact mostly communists, burned churches, raped nuns and tortured and executed priests. There are accounts of Catholic faithful being forced to swallow rosary beads, thrown down mine shafts and gored to death by bulls in bull fighting rings.

The most awful irony I learned was that the International Brigades, so glorified in the west, were responsible for many of the worst anti-Catholic atrocities. I was especially horrified to learn that these brigades titled themselves after such great men as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.

Wherever your political sensibilities lie you will very much enjoy reading Mr. Thomas' well researched and well written book.

Rating:
Summary: A disaster of a book!!!
Review: It's been a while since i read such a poor work like this one.I had my hopes when i started reading this book.But as i read it,i realized the author doesnt care about the reader because he never explains anything.He never explains who's who, what's what.He just describes what he's seeing but without troubling himself with explaining the reader important facts necesarry to understand.His narrative is dull and,simply put it,boring.It makes you wonder if the author was being punished and writing this book was his punishment.I never really understood what was going on in Spain at that time,nor did the author made any effort to explain it to you.I had to stop reading it at page 198 and then i tossed the book.I realized that explaining the different situations and turmoils of the Spanish Civil war is difficult but Mr Thomas just makes it more confusing.Right now i am reading Anthony Beevor's Spanish Civil War and,altough i am just on page 54, the book is good and with good and simple explanations as to what really happen in that war.Dont even bother with Mr Thomas' book.

Rating:
Summary: Still the Best One Volume History
Review: This 1994 edition (a 2nd or 3rd revision of the first edition put out c. 1980 I believe) is apparently not available because a newer revised edition is coming out in November 2001 with updated information no doubt--you should pick up this latest coming edition. Understanding the subject of the Spanish Civil War has been plagued by two major obstacles: 1) The use of the Spanish Civil war as merely a prelude to WWII by historians of the English speaking world, i.e., crudely lumping in Franco and the Nationalists as just a Spanish variation of Facism; this ignores the study of Spanish history in its own right and the unique and tragic facets of Iberian history; 2) The use and abuse of the Spanish Civil War as an ideological forum for anarchists and "Trotskyite" anti-Stalinist communists, again, mostly from the English speaking world. The biased accounts of Anglo/American/Canadian leftists of this period (as well as Hemingway's romanticized fiction) have distorted and confused the event in the eyes of the English-speaking world. Its good to see an English scholar clear up this mess. Thomas' account clearly delineates the various factions and their goals on both sides, pointing out that lack of unity and in-fighting of the various factions of the left-of-center Republican side (if "Republican" is even a proper term to use by the time the Stalinists were done with it) was probably more decisive in leading to its downfall than the outside pressure of the Nationalists (who were by no means unified in ideology, but greatly more cooperative amongst themselves than the Republicans). The "cowardly" stance of the Democratic Western countries is made understandable and must be seen in the context of their own instability and weakness of the time. In retrospect, any aid to Republican Spain would have probably only helped the Stalinist-controlled communists complete their strangle-hold on the Republican coalition government, the other factions--especially the anarchists--being severely and savagely purged by them (my own opinion). In any case, Thomas' outstanding research and balanced account of the event allows each reader to draw their own conclusion without undue ideological bias. If you read only one history of the Spanish Civil War, this is the one to have.

Rating:
Summary: Strong narrative / some weak points in analysis
Review: This book is a 1000+ page-turner. When I picked it up, I knew nothing about the Spanish Civil War. This book definitely remedied that. Hugh Thomas begins shortly before the outbreak of the war and tells the story through to its completion (essentially 1936-1939). It is somewhat long, but the story itself is so compelling and Thomas' writing so good that it sucked me in and moved along nicely.

I have only a couple of gripes. First, if someone wants a short introduction, this may not be the book. I am sure there are other titles out there that will give you the basic facts in less time. As I said, however, reading the book was entertaining enough that I did not mind at all. As an example of an interesting factoid that emerges from this book, it seems that a substantial portion of the treasure from America that Spain won in the 16th century was given to the Soviets for safe-keeping. It is still there.

Second, while the book is strong on narrative, it is a little bit weak in analysis. What is especially lacking is an understanding of the factors that led to the outbreak of war in the first place. The books starts with a short chapter describing Spain in the early 20th century and plunges directly into the events leading up to the war. While the suspense before the outbreak of the war is palpable, the basic question of why a country would degenerate into civil war is hardly touched. In fairness to the author, he may have deliberately chosen to focus on the war itself rather than its causes. On the other hand, the discussion about why the Nationalists defeated the Republicans is fairly good. Two factors stand out. First, the Republicans were crippled by in-fighting amongst the factions, a fact that is admirably discussed. Second, the Nationalists received substantial help from abroad.

Author background: I am not a historian, but have read a handful of books on Spanish history.

Rating:
Summary: Strong narrative / some weak points in analysis
Review: This book is a 1000+ page-turner. When I picked it up, I knew nothing about the Spanish Civil War. This book definitely remedied that. Hugh Thomas begins shortly before the outbreak of the war and tells the story through to its completion (essentially 1936-1939). It is somewhat long, but the story itself is so compelling and Thomas' writing so good that it sucked me in and moved along nicely.

I have only a couple of gripes. First, if someone wants a short introduction, this may not be the book. I am sure there are other titles out there that will give you the basic facts in less time. As I said, however, reading the book was entertaining enough that I did not mind at all. As an example of an interesting factoid that emerges from this book, it seems that a substantial portion of the treasure from America that Spain won in the 16th century was given to the Soviets for safe-keeping. It is still there.

Second, while the book is strong on narrative, it is a little bit weak in analysis. What is especially lacking is an understanding of the factors that led to the outbreak of war in the first place. The books starts with a short chapter describing Spain in the early 20th century and plunges directly into the events leading up to the war. While the suspense before the outbreak of the war is palpable, the basic question of why a country would degenerate into civil war is hardly touched. In fairness to the author, he may have deliberately chosen to focus on the war itself rather than its causes. On the other hand, the discussion about why the Nationalists defeated the Republicans is fairly good. Two factors stand out. First, the Republicans were crippled by in-fighting amongst the factions, a fact that is admirably discussed. Second, the Nationalists received substantial help from abroad.

Author background: I am not a historian, but have read a handful of books on Spanish history.

Rating:
Summary: The best book on the Spanish Civil War
Review: When I moved to Barcelona, Spain in 1980, people were still talking about the Civil War. They had only recently been allowed public discussion of such topics since the death of the dictator, Franco. So, the war was still very recent for a lot of people.

I couldn't understand who all the factions were and what the background of this conflict was when listening to people talk about it. I found this book, read it and it told me everything I wanted to know. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in this era of Spanish history. Very well-written and readable.