Customer Reviews

Fallen Sparrows: The International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War (Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society) (Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society)

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Descuidado. It means careless, not paying full attention. That is how I found this book to be. When a book doesn't have even proper spell-checking, you wonder if there might have been much fact-checking. The typesetting is unconventional (left-justified) and annoying to read. Descuidado... for citing Gerald Brenan as a scholar on the subject (Brenan was a marginally educated ne'er-do-well who became a minor writer after living in Spain - hardly the qualifications of a scholar).

Parts of Fallen Sparrows are good summaries of certain aspects of the Spanish Civil War but there are elements of the book that suggest a bit of uneven handling of the material, as well as some factual errors. I am not convinced that this is an entirely unbiased treatment of the subject matter.