Customer Reviews

The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Maybe I've been spoiled by the graceful prose of historians like Barbara Tuchman, Antony Beevor and John Keegan, but the prose in this book is of the quality of how-to manuals written by non-English-speaking engineers. I expected better from Oxford. Oddly, it improves after the first 30-odd pages, but why? Didn't anyone edit the MS, for tortured, clumsy prose and neologisms, that is, words that simply don't exist in English? Didn't the author reread her own work, or rewrite any of it?
The conflict described is a unique and complicated one; it's difficult to find a history of it that doesn't take sides. Was Franco a psychopath? Possibly. Did the Repulican(liberal) government deliberately target catholic priests and nuns for execution? I can't be sure. It's hard to say, when so many of the writers seem to be biased, one way or the other. To this day(2010), a percentage of the films made in Spain are about the Spanish Civil War. That tells me that the wounds to Spanish society, like the wounds to Argentina and Chile, have not yet been healed. We need something better than this book to lay out the forces acting on the country before, during and after the war, briefly and clearly.

There's so much material in this little book that I had to read it twice: the first time I was overwhelmed.

There's an 8 page chronology at the back of the book which I suggest reading first, to get an overview of the flow of events.

I had arrived at this book after reading Rudolf Rocker's "The Tragedy of Spain" and Colin Ward's "Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction", both of which discuss the role of the anarcho-syndicalist trade-union CNT in this civil war. The Wikipdea entry "Anarchism in Spain" also presents a significant role for the CNT in the Spanish Civil War. Graham references the CNT in a number of places but in minor ways, so I'm left uncertain as to whether they played as large a role as Rocker and Ward indicate. Graham notes some conflicts between the CNT and socialist groups which interfered with their working together effectively. Without help from England, France, and the United States and with limited help from the Soviet Union, the Left in Spain was at a huge disadvantage, given Italy and Germany's support of Franco. It seemed remarkable that the Left was able to fight for as long as it did.

I don't recall studying anything about this civil war in school, let alone knowing how much was involved. The relevance seems high: a country in which conservatives and liberals were in serious conflict. The conservatives started a war. A sobering lesson: bombing of, imprisonment of and execution of liberals. The conservatives won.

Graham has done her job in this introduction: I'm encouraged to read more about the Spanish Civil War. Graham provides 5 pages of further reading which includes some websites (3 in Spanish 2 in English).

I don't think the author got the concept of a an introduction. She should have not only summarized the events (which she did) but put them in readable prose, simplified so the unenlightened reader could grasp the subject easily. Isn't that the point of an intro? Instead, we get a book poorly written with deadening prose.

OUP's "A Very Short Introduction" series is a usually fun, even great, set of books despite being of an admittedly inconsistent quality. With this volume, though, I was appalled in a way I couldn't imagine being with any of the others which I felt to have fallen short.

Dr Graham is a Oxford DPhil whose interest in the Spanish Civil War seems to center on Progressive cultural and gender issues of the time, framed in another of her books as the Republic's "struggle for modernity". There's no such thing as an unbiased work, especially in the realm of contemporary social and cultural issues, but writing an even keeled survey of a topic as broad as the Spanish Civil War shouldn't be an arduous task for a professionally trained historian fluent in the subject. When a competent historian is commissioned to cram such a hearty subject into about a 150 non-scholarly pages the book should nearly write itself. Graham, instead of writing a survey history of the topic, uses the opportunity to translate her sympathies with the Popular Front and "contextualizing" of Republican atrocities, into a full blown polemic. As a matter of fact, with all the ideological sermonizing, Republican apologia and demonizing of the crudely caricatured Nationalist peasant and working class, I'm not surprised Graham was unable to fit in all the material she should have covered into such a constrained space. This book treats us to a lecture on the Spanish Civil War as a cultural and economic class struggle against a repressive landed elite, a parasitically neo-Imperialist Spanish officer corps and the always gleefully deconstructed religious rubes in the countryside, tricked by a corrupt clergy into acting against "their own best interests". By the end you can practically hear her gnashing teeth and cries of dismay as the Republic falls apart and Franco's forces close in on victory. I suppose I could say that if this book had been a pamphlet or essay on the Civil War from a socialist or even broadly leftist perspective I would have been able to give such naked bias a pass.

Other reviewers have devoted some substantial space to Graham's poor prose. While it's not good, and sometimes even ugly, it's not so uniformly bad as to be unreadable or even significantly distracting. She does indulge in neologism that has no place in a book like this but it never devolves to Bhabha-esque pseudo-intellectual babble. On the other hand, also mentioned by other reviewers, her dismissive use of scare quotes when discussing the grievances of various groups supportive of the Nationalist alliance is irritating in the extreme. Such pretentiously blithe dismissal can't be attributed to brevity, especially in light of the space devoted to the struggles of more peripheral figures in the Republican movement. As pointed out by another reviewer Graham nearly ignores the entire Carlist faction and yet spills significant ink over members of the Republican forces for no other reason than Graham finds them to be individually interesting sociological studies in sexuality and gender. Such prioritization in a historical survey of the Civil War is bizarre, in the extreme.

All of that disappointment out of the way I will say that Graham manages to collapse some excruciatingly complex topics in more manageable conceptualizations. The logic used to reach these more edible conclusions require some fairly robust defense and take some liberty with very contested subjects. Her treatment of the CNT is intellectually aggressive and worthy of serious debate but impossible to really encapsulate in a book like this. The socialist and more radically Progressive reader will find some of this possibly inspiring but having not read Graham's other books in their entirety I'm not sure I could recommend this volume to them instead.

All of the material I've consumed on the Spanish Civil War consists of ponderous books and online essays so I'm unable to recommend another "introductory" book in this one's stead. I might have to resign myself to the possibility that there simply isn't one and the only opportunity so far to write one has been lost to the puzzling decision to hand over the volume in AVSI's collection to Graham. It's my genuine hope that in a decade or so OUP will give us an unstated mea culpa on the topic with a new effort by a different author.

I came to "The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction" as a novice to the subject. I've gleaned some general facts from the Internet but I thought a short audiobook would give me something of an overview of the main events and players of the Spanish Civil War so that I could dig in to the subject with more substantive books. Part of my curiosity was triggered by seeing "There be Dragons," which showed a side of the Spanish Civil War that isn't often portrayed or discussed in the popular media, namely the atrocities commited by the Spanish Republicans.

Unfortunately, this book is a disappointment. Graham seems to have made it her mission to make sure that no one came away from her book without understanding that Franco and the "rebels" were "brutal" - Graham never refers to the opponents of the Spanish Republic as "Nationalists" and she uses the term "brutal" repeatedly in describing the Nationalists and never with respect to the Republicans - and that the great tragedy of the Spanish Civil War was that the Republicans lost. This is not hyperbole; at the end of the book Graham spends time explaining how a modern Spanish historian who has written a book on the "Myths of the Spanish Civil War," which apparently challenges the leftist interpretation, is a "Francoist" who threatens to fill the minds of the new generation with Francoist propaganda. In other words, Graham has a clear interest in the polemical uses of history.

For anyone who approaches the Spanish Civil War without a particular dog in the fight, Graham's one-sided narrative becomes more and more obvious as the book progresses. I found myself making a game out of predicting where Graham would manage to spin mirror behaviors of the Nationalists and Republicans in a way that she could indict the "rebels" and exonerate the Republicans. For example, both sides engaged in atrocities, but the Republicans' motivation arose out of the concrete grievances that they had experienced, while the "rebels" committed their atrocities out of their atavistic fear of change and the "Other." So, really, the Republicans, you see, were entitled to the social change they wanted, whereas the Nationalists needed a healthy round of therapy. That's helpful.

But it isn't and that kind of authorial "projection" is constantly injected into Graham's narrative. Although Graham concludes her book with a long dissertation about the need for nuance and attention to detail, she provides no nuance when it comes to the events. Franco is stupid and brutal; the Republicans are motivated by good ideals and desire for progress. Graham has no interest in the discussing the Nationalist's position - apart from the mention of Franco we never really hear the name of any other Nationalist. The Nationalists are a faceless mass; in other words, they become the "Other" for Graham.

On the other hand, we do get a lot of details on the Republicans. We see the suffering of the war from the Republican side. We learn about Republican leaders. We learn about the history of the Republicans after the war. All of which is good and decent history, so long as it is accurate, but not very balanced or nuanced.

At times Graham's polemics seems make her distort or omit key facts. For example, an important thesis to Graham is that the Nationalist coup was entirely unjustified and unprovoked. In making this argument she explains away the revolt in Asturias on the grounds that the people of Asturias learned from the election of 1934, which made the Catholic CEDAS party the majority party, that they couldn't expect to have their grievances resolved democratically. But according to what I've read, the new cabinet was formed on September 29, 1934 - and CEDA was denied its right to form a government - and the general strike was kicked off on October 5, 1934. That hardly seems to be sufficient time for the conservative government to have infringed on the rights of the Socialists; rather, it suggests that the Spanish Socialists didn't view themselves as particularly obligated to play by Democratic rules.

This interpretation may or may not be true, but Graham's pre-emptive strike, which was made without giving all the facts, indicates that she is not to be trusted without verification of her facts.

Another example is her apologetic for Socialist atrocities. She does acknowledge that almost 7,000 priests, nuns and bishops were killed in Republican areas, but she excuses the Republicans on the ground that Nationalist coup had caused a breakdown of law and order in Republican areas. This may be a fair point, but she doesn't advise that there was a definite correlation between the murder of priests and the times when Socialists made themselves the only power. For example, in the 1934 revolt in the Asturias, 29 priests were murdered and churches were burned. Likewise, Graham doesn't mention the church burnings and expropriation of Catholic property that occurred before the Nationalist rebellion. On another occasion, Graham affirms the Republican commitment to constitutionality and plurality by the fact that in 1937 it permited Catholics to worship in public, which caused me to pause for a moment and wonder (a) when had the Republic denied Catholics the right to worship in public? and (b) was that viewed as "persecution" which had been a cause of the Nationalist revolt?

Who knows? Graham apparently didn't think that spending time on the history of Socialist persecution of Catholics or the Catholic experience of such persecution was important to an understanding of the Spanish Civil War. As I said, Graham's book is not long on nuance.

At least it's not long on nuance when it comes to the Nationalist side. When it comes to the Republican side, we get informed about the racism of the war, and how there were two African-American volunteers in the international brigades. We also learn that a Finnish-American international brigade member was homosexual and his experience of the Spanish Civil War played an important role in his reconstructing the dynamics of sexuality and politics as a precursor to the "New Left." We also learn that there were all kinds of leftist and progressive organizations, but nothing really about their separate ideologies.

On the other hand, I didn't learn a thing about the "Carlists" and who they were and what made them different from "Falangists." Apparently, very short introductions have time for the only known American homosexual who fought for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, but no time for one of the major Nationalist elements. For that kind of information, I will just have to go to some other source.

I'm giving this book two stars with an indication for one star. I give it two stars because it does seem to be a fair example of the leftist/progressive polemical approach to the history of the Spanish Civil War and, to be fair, if you are interested in "A Very Short Introduction to the Republican Side of the Spanish Civil War as Presented by an Apologist for the Republican Side" this book is very good.

This is one of the best books on the Spanish Civil War I have ever had. Not only does it do a great job at explaining the events before and during the war, but it dares to dive into the events afterwards. The major battles, the political parties, and the prisons.
It also has a huge list of books for further reading and a great time line. I would suggest it for any person interested in Spain or history in general. Helen Graham has done a great job.

There is some interesting material in this book, especially the chapter on the post-war period, but the account of the war reads as if it were written 30 years ago. It is strongly shaded to the Republican side (this has been the rare war in which history was written by the losers). Both the Church and the Nationalists are portrayed more negatively that the current state of research would justify. Anthony Beevor's excellent and more balanced account is not mentioned in the bibliography, nor is the important book by Stanley G. Payne on the involvement of the Soviet Union in the running of the war on the Republican side. The bibliography assumes reader cannot read Spanish, a language widely-known in the States. The author is obviously very familiar with the subject. I am sorry the book was not better.

I usually enjoy the volumes in the VSI series from Oxford University Press, but this is a glaring exception. The author, as other reviewers have noted, seeks out less to provide a history of the conflict then to paint a ringing endorsement of the Spanish Republicans. As someone with very little background knowledge in the conflict, this bias is still glaringly obvious. In addition, the book is horrendously written, with random scatterings of text boxes, superfluous use of quotations to ridicule nationalist positions, and slapshod organization. I have turned instead to Antony Beevor's "Spanish Civil War", which, while in many ways sympathetic to the left (as I am myself) at least attempts to reach a nuanced understanding of the conflict. Negative stars.

As one of the foremost scholars of the spanish civil war , Graham cogently sumarized various aspects of war and related them with the present , namely , how post-war Spain perceived the war and its impact on the modern day Spain. Especially helpful was the bibiliography that surely gives the direction of reading for those who want to know more about the Spanish civil war. The downside of the book is , as one reviewer mentioned, Graham tend to minimize the cover on CNT-FAI and Anarchist activities as many other scholars have done so far despete Anarchists contribution and controversial collectives would have been very interesting subjects.

Taken for what it is, this book is very good. As the tital suggests, it really is nothing more than "A very short introduction" to be considered as a jumping off point for further studies. It does not go into depth but rather highlights the key events of the civil war. It does a particularly good job of explaining the tacit war of politics taking place between France, Italy, Germany, and Russia surrounding the conflict in Spain.
There are parts of the book that seem to wander a bit, but on a whole I don't think you could ask for a more accessible introduction to the Spanish Civil War.