A book I’ve had on the shelf for a coupla years now & as winter descends this will become part of my day time reading!As I do with History book reviews I’ll give a shorter review at the start giving my overall thoughts/feelings on the writing & style whilst following that I’ll give a more in depth overview of what the book/chapters consisted of. Which is in essence the notes Ive made along the way.The beginning of the book has a series of maps (to refer to later) as well as the main parties in t...

I've had this book 5 or 6 years. Because I was intimidated by the complexity of the political events in Spain during the 1930s I'd put off reading it. Many years ago--1967--I read the Hugh Thomas history of the Spanish Civil War and had gotten lost in the mazes and Babel of parties right, center, and left, each accompanied by its own acronym and ideology. Beevor does a good job in that regard. He does what he can in his account to keep the fog away, to keep the parties and acryoyms tidily arrang...

while having some factual information, so 2 stars rather than the one star the book mostly deserves, this book reaffirmed my decision not to ever read books about Spain written by Englishmen and stick with books written by native Spanish people as the clear anti-Spanish bias that has been showing in pretty much all the English books featuring Spain or Spanish characters that I've been reading for 40+ years now shows very clearly herejust avoid

Great and balanced account of the Spanish civil war, superbly researched and documented

I didn't know anything about the Spanish Civil War until I read this book. And what an eye-opener it is. Spain in the 1930s was a country in transition. It had just come out of the departure of King Alfonso XIII and a new republic was trying to get itself established. But forces from across the political spectrum took turns weakening the Republic to further their own agenda: the political and social conservatives who wanted to retain the status quo of monopoly of power and privilege; the social

Antony Beevor is probably best-known today for his lengthy histories of the battles of Stalingrad and Berlin, but this earlier narrative of the Spanish Civil War matches both of these later works for grim and gripping detail. While one might expect a historian of the Second World War to treat the Spanish conflict as a prologue to that larger and deadlier global struggle, Beevor sees that the civil war had great significance in its own right. It was a struggle between ideologies, in which both th...

I've read quite a few of Antony Beevor's history books and all are characterised by his thoroughness, detail and authority. Despite all being detailed they are always absorbing accounts. Despite reading a lot of fiction about set during the Spanish Civil War, and of course Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell, I'd never read a proper account.The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939 helped me understand just how much I didn't know, and contextualise what I did know. Antony Beevor giv...

The new edition of Beevor's classical account of the Spanish Civil War does not disappoint the author's many fans. His narrations of famous battles are outstanding, particularly in the cases of Teruel and Ebro. His characterizations remain spot-on. Franco is wily as he sacrifices thousands of his men for political gains. Azaña is decent but weak. Largo Caballero is a poor man's Kerensky, whereas Negrín is a would-be Stalin. Communist leaders Líster and El Campesino quarrel as the front collapses...

[He puesto una traducción española abajo, en el spoiler.] As the Spanish Civil War proved, the first casualty of war is not truth, but its source: the conscience and integrity of the individual. Anthony Beevor is a military historian; and his book is mainly a record of armies and battles. The forces that destabilized the government and created so much tension within the country are quickly summarized; and the aftermath of the war—its legacy, its lingering effects in Spanish political life, its...

I found this book nearly unreadable and gave up on it within the first 100 pages. As such, take this review with that in mind since I didn't gut through it. I had heard great things about Beevor's "Stalingrad" and may still read it someday. "The Battle for Spain", however, suffers from a few serious problems: its choice to be a straight political history and Beevor's writing style. I am not a fan of this kind of history writing. It is top-down narrative history at its worst. It is no doubt inval...

Spoilers: the good guys win.

Even Antony Beevor Can't Simplify Such a Complicated Topic ...The Spanish Civil War is a significant 20th century historical event that is logically obscured by the enormity of the Second World War. My rudimentary knowledge of the conflict led me to simplify it as a war between the Nazi supported Nationalists vs. the Soviet supported Republicans ... oh how wrong I was. My search to expand my knowledge of the Spanish Civil War both started and ended with the discovery Antony Beevor's THE BATTLE F...

This is simply the worst written history book it has ever been my misfortune to attempt to read. I can only assume the many people who rate it highly went into it with an already good knowledge of the people and events of the Spanish Civil War. For a beginner, it's appalling.Beevor simply lists names and events with absolutely no analysis of them. Even the major players get no description - physical or biographical. Franco, as just one example, appears as an already existing leader - no backgrou...

Histories of wars, particularly ones involving contested political domains, tend to focus either on the battles, the personalities, the international struggles, or other specific aspects. While Beevor's 'Battle for Spain' isn't perfect, I give this book five stars because the mix is just right. And for one of the most disputed wars in modern history, that is a major accomplishment.We can find any number of anarchist or Trotskyist reviews of the Spanish Civil War that heap blame on the Russians a...

Can you hear the drums Fernando?This is a great book - also, very sad.I've always been fascinated with the story of the Spanish Civil War, and what it signified. In many ways, it was the precusor to WW2, and the fight between the Axis-backed nationalist forces and Soviet-backed republicans offers an insight into what will transpire in Europe over the next several years. It also dispels the easy myths around the black-and-white truth of what the Spanish Civil War is in popular media.The author go...

Well, seven chapters (80 pages) in, I have to acknowledge that I find Beevor's book pretty much unreadable. It's a combination of poor organization (it's hard to figure out at any given point where he is going with things - he makes detours from a purely chronological account for no apparent reason) and excessive, mind-numbing detail in places. A typical sentence:Between 5 and 12 March he (Mola) had meetings with other key conspirators: Orgaz, Goded, Ponte, Kindelan, Saliquet, Franco, Galarza, F...

A long serious read about an era in European history that I knew but in a limited way. This book by historian Antony Beevor sets out in a readable fashion to cover the whole was, its causes and aftermath. A mammoth task. The account starts well with the rising of the generals and the nationalist advance across Spain. The main battle areas are covered but the sheer amount of the various factions and unfamiliar names made it quite difficult to follow and at times it was difficult to know which sid...

Rather military-oriented. Clear sympathy for the Republican cause. Very detailed, but synthesis is missing.

This "must be" the most balanced account of the Spanish Civil War ever published. I say "must be" because this is the first one that I have read in its entirety (up to now, I had only read the first volume of Hugh Thomas' book, which was good, but left me a bit cold, to be honest) so I don't think I would be fair if I said that it is the best and most balanced, in spite of having read reviews in the Spanish press that point in that direction. I thoroughly enjoyed the first part of the book, whic...

An excellent analysis of a conflict in which the Spanish people are the filling in a sandwich, the slices comprising a fight between the extreme right and extreme left. To make matters worse, as is well known, the conflict became the testing ground for Hitler and Stalin to play with their toys of war. The book is well constructed, and very readable, suffering only from the author's mild tendency to repeat the lessons he wishes the reader to retain, in a schoolmasterish fashion. Although the book...