BOOK NEWS:

TWO BROTHERS CHOOSE DIFFERENT SIDES OF THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR IN THIS EPIC NOVEL

In 1934, the dark storm clouds of war were already gathering over Europe.  People whose lives had been reduced to abject misery by the twin blows of World War I and the Depression sought a better life while those of rank and privilege opposed them. This festering conflict came to a head first in Spain, where a military coup led to a first modern, unconstrained war that was soon to become horribly familiar to the rest of Europe.  By the time Spain’s fratricidal conflict ended, over one million people had perished.

Against this grim backdrop we watch as Juan and Pedro Avila choose their different paths.  Brother is set against brother as the maelstrom of war carries them away.

Juan strives for the Communists, and falls in love with the beautiful Hilda Krantz, a deadly communist agent.  When she betrays him, he fights on, though wracked with cynicism and despair.  When he finally stands over his brother’s body on a battlefield, he comes to see the barrenness of his cause and redirects himself toward the light.

Wayfarers of Fate
$17.50 pp available from the following:

• New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman: “I believe the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is to the big ‘clash of civilizations’ now under way between the Muslim world and the West what the Spanish Civil War was to World War II.  It’s off-Broadway to Broadway.  The Spanish Civil War was the theater where great European powers tested many weapons and tactics that were later deployed on a larger scale in WWII.  Similarly, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been the small theater where many weapons and tactics are tested [and] then go global…so you can learn a lot about how the larger war now playing out in Iraq and Afghanistan can proceed.”
• The film, Land and Freedom, about a British Communist in the Spanish Civil War recently played on the Sundance channel.
• Hemingway’s For Who the Bell Tolls, the story of the losing side in the Spanish War, is playing on TCM/TV.
• In Spain, they are presently fighting over Franco’s legacy—and his tomb.
• Two books have been, in 2006, republished by a socialist press in Oakland, one by notorious Communist Emma Goldman and another by radical leftist, Durruti, who was a hero of the Communists in the Spanish War.
• The Travel / TV Channel, in November, aired a return to Spain of a conservative British legislator, who is the son of a former Spanish Communist college professor, who was self-exiled to Britain after the Spanish War.