The Two Spains

In the summer of 1936 a group of generals rose against Spain's elected Republic, and within days a modern European country had split in two. What followed was not one war but many at once: a war of armies, a war of ideas, a war of nations fought on Spanish soil, and a savage war of neighbor against neighbor. The Two Spains is the epic, human, and astonishingly clear story of the conflict that became the great rehearsal for the twentieth century.

From the parched estates of the south and the anarchist barricades of Barcelona to Franco's Army of Africa flown across the sea by Hitler's transport planes; from the defenders of Madrid crying "They shall not pass" to the terror bombing of Guernica that gave Picasso his masterpiece; from the thirty-five thousand volunteers of the International Brigades to Stalin's gold and the cynical farce of Non-Intervention; from the frozen slaughter of Teruel and the Ebro to the long walk into exile and the graves still being opened in the twenty-first century — E.B Cohen weaves the politics, the battles, the culture, and the memory into a single gripping narrative for the curious reader.

It is the one book for anyone who has ever seen Guernica, read Orwell or Hemingway, or wondered how a nation comes to destroy itself — and why, nearly a century on, Spain still argues about what happened.