Best of
Spain

2002

Fever and Spear


Javier Marías - 2002
    With Fever and Spear, Volume One of his unfolding novel Your Face Tomorrow, he returns us to the rarified world of Oxford (the delightful setting of All Souls and Dark Back of Time), while introducing us to territory entirely new--espionage. Our hero, Jaime Deza, separated from his wife in Madrid, is a bit adrift in London until his old friend Sir Peter Wheeler retired Oxford don and semi-retired master spy recruits him for a new career in British Intelligence. Deza possesses a rare gift for seeing behind the masks people wear. He is soon observing interviews conducted by Her Majesty's secret service: variously shady international businessmen one day, would-be coup leaders the next. Seductively, this metaphysical thriller explores past, present, and future in the ever-more-perilous 21st century. This compelling and enigmatic tour de force from one of Europe's greatest writers continues with Volume Two, Dance and Dream."

The Queen of the South


Arturo Pérez-Reverte - 2002
    Teresa Mendoza is his girlfriend, a typical narco's morra-- quiet, doting, submissive. But then Guero's caught playing both sides, and in Sinaloa, that means death. Teresa finds herself alone, terrified, friendless and running to save her life, carrying nothing but a gym bag containing a pistol and a notebook that she has been forbidden to read. Forced to leave Mexico, she flees to the Spanish city of Melilla, where she meets Santiago Fisterra, a Galician involved in trafficking hashish across the Strait of Gibraltar. When Santiago's partner is captured, it is Teresa who steps in to take his place. Now Teresa has plunged into the dark and ugly world that once claimed Guero's life-- and she's about to get in deeper...

The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain


María Rosa Menocal - 2002
    Combining the best of what Muslim, Jewish, and Christian cultures had to offer, al-Andalus and its successors influenced the rest of Europe in dramatic ways, from the death of liturgical Latin and the spread of secular poetry, to remarkable feats in architecture, science, and technology. The glory of the Andalusian kingdoms endured until the Renaissance, when Christian monarchs forcibly converted, executed, or expelled non-Catholics from Spain. In this wonderful book, we can finally explore the lost history whose legacy is still with us in countless ways. Author Biography: María Rosa Menocal is R. Selden Rose Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and head of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University. She lives in New Haven, CT.

Doves of War: Four Women of Spain


Paul Preston - 2002
    In this beautifully written biographical work, Paul Preston tells the forgotten war stories of four exceptional women whose lives were starkly altered by the war.The portraits in this provocative, yet objective volume mirror the war itself, with the left pitted against the right. On the left side are Margarita Neken, the revolutionary feminist, writer, and politician; and Nan Green, the communist nurse who left her children behind in England to fight against fascism alongside her husband in the International Brigades. On the right side are Mercedes Sanz Bachiller, the most powerful woman in the Francoist zone; and Priscilla Scott-Ellis, the wealthy English socialite who, lured to Spain by love, stayed on to help the fascist war effort as a nurse on the front lines.

Gaudi: Complete Works


Aurora Cuito - 2002
    It includes preliminary sketches and chapters about glasshouses, chimneys, 'trencadis' work, ceramic, doors, animals, etc... A 'must have' book.

Picasso's War: The Destruction of Guernica and the Masterpiece That Changed the World


Russell Martin - 2002
    In Picasso's War, Martin weaves politics, history, art, and science into a stirring narrative of the monumental canvas that was to become the most important artwork of the 20th century.

Deadly Embrace: Morocco and the Road to the Spanish Civil War


Sebastian Balfour - 2002
    Spain's new colonial venture in Morocco in the early twentieth-century turned into a bloody war against the tribes resisting the Spanish invasion of their lands. After suffering a succession of heavy military disasters against some of the most accomplished guerrillas in the world, the Spanish army turned to chemical warfare and dropped massive quantities of mustard gas on civilians. Dr Balfour exposes this previously closely guarded secret using evidence from Spanish military archives and from survivors in Morocco. He also narrates the daily life of soldiers in the war as well as the self-images and tensions among the colonial officers. After looking at the motives that drove Moroccans to resist or cooperate with Spain, the author describes the contradictory pictures among Spaniards of Moroccan collaborators and foes. Finally, he examines the Spanish colonial army's response to the Second Republic of 1931-1936 and its brutal march through Spain in the Civil War.

The Wound and Dream: Sixty Years of American Poems about the Spanish Civil War


Cary Nelson - 2002
    Born out of the struggle between fascism and democracy and considered the first battle of World War II, the Spanish Civil War holds tremendous ideological significance and has inspired a remarkable range of American poetry.  The Wound and the Dream represents the sixty-year tradition of American poetic responses to the Spanish Civil War and provides an overview of progressive American poetry as a whole. Four of the featured poets–-Alvah Bessie, William Lindsay Gresham, James Neugass, and Edwin Rolfe–-were members of the International Brigade. Their poetry appears alongside lesser–known works by some of the greatest American poets of the twentieth century, including Wallace Stevens, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Randall Jarrell, Langston Hughes, and Philip Levine.   Cary Nelson's introduction  discusses the collective nature of the poems, puts them in their international context, and provides a sturdy framework for interpreting the Spanish Civil War as a historical conjecture that has dramatically altered the ways we read and write poetry. The book also includes a brief biography of each poet and a glossary of related terms.

The Spanish Republic at War 1936 1939


Helen Graham - 2002
    It claims that the wartime responses and limitations of the movement can be understood only in relationship to its pre-war experiences, world views, organizational structures and the wider cultural context. It also asserts that the most significant influence on the evolution of the Republic between 1936 and 1939 was the war itself.

Medieval Spain: Culture, Conflict and Coexistence


Roger Collins - 2002
    Its primary concern is the relationships between the various ethnic, cultural, regional, and religious communities that co-existed in the Iberian peninsula in the later Middle Ages. Conflicts and mutual interactions between them are here explored in a range of both historical and literary studies, to expose something of the rich diversity of the cultural life of later medieval Spain.

Exile and Cultural Hegemony: Spanish Intellectuals in Mexico, 1939-1975


Sebastiaan Faber - 2002
    During the three and a half decades of Francoist dictatorship, these exiles held that the Republic, not Francoism, represented the authentic culture of Spain. In this environment, as Sebastiaan Faber argues in "Exile and Cultural Hegemony," the Spaniards' conception of their role as intellectuals changed markedly over time.The first study of its kind to place the exiles' ideological evolution in a broad historical context, "Exile and Cultural Hegemony" takes into account developments in both Spanish and Mexican politics from the early 1930s through the 1970s. Faber pays particular attention to the intellectuals' persistent nationalism and misplaced illusions of pan-Hispanist grandeur, which included awkward and ironic overlaps with the rhetoric employed by their enemies on the Francoist right. This embrace of nationalism, together with the intellectuals' dependence on the increasingly authoritarian Mexican regime and the international climate of the Cold War, eventually caused them to abandon the Gramscian ideal of the intellectual as political activist in favor of a more liberal, apolitical stance preferred by, among others, the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset.With its comprehensive approach to topics integral to Spanish culture, both students of and those with a general interest in twentieth-century Spanish literature, history, or culture will find "Exile and Cultural Hegemony" a fascinating and groundbreaking work.

Ibn Garcia's Shu' Biyya Letter: Ethnic and Theological Tensions in Medieval Al-Andalus


Göran Larsson - 2002
    By analysing a letter composed by Ibn Garcia during the 11th century, the tensions between Arab and non-Arab Muslims are discussed in detail. Symbols, stories and legends used in the shu' biyyah corpus of writings are analysed in the light of the political and theological development in al-Andalus and the Muslim world. Authority, legitimacy and power are central both to the discussion of Ibn Garcia s letter and the history of the shu' biyyah movement. The first part gives the historical background to the history of al-Andalus. Ethnic conflicts and tensions related to authority and power are of special interest. The second part, gives a detailed analysis of Ibn Garcia s shu' biyyah letter in relation to the historical and contemporary situation in al-Andalus."

The CNT in the Spanish Revolution: Volume 1


José Peirats - 2002
    Documenting a history of revolution that failed at the hands of its enemies on both the reformist left and reactionary right, this intelligent account covers all areas of the anarchist experience—from the spontaneous militias and the revolutionary collectives to the moral dilemmas occasioned by the clash of revolutionary ideals and the stark reality of the war effort. Passionately written and carefully indexed, this edition is the only in-depth English-language text available and converts the work into a usable tool for historians and anarchists alike. Volume 1 focuses on the initial stages of the Spanish Revolution as the CNT gathered strength, built an anarchist civilian and military movement, and confronted Franco's fascist army. Additionally, "The History of a History" by editor Chris Ealham traces the writing, publication, and various turns Peirats' book took to reach this new English-language text.

Constructing Identity in Contemporary Spain: Theoretical Debates and Cultural Practice


Jo Labanyi - 2002
    The aim is to introduce readers to current theoretical debates in a range of disciplines, as well as to inform them about specific areas of twentieth-century Spanish culture.