Hell and Good Company: The Spanish Civil War and the World It Made

Rhodes (The Making of the Atomic Bomb) recounts the human and medical sides of the Spanish Civil War (1936–9). Pitting the Spanish Republic against a right-wing military revolt, the war drew in tens of thousands of antifascist international volunteers, plus regular forces from fascist Germany and Italy. But this book sidelines familiar politics in favor of human stories. Some of the narratives are whimsical—a celebrated author ducking cannon fire to hand out grapefruit or British nurses bathing in a river and scandalizing the villagers. Other accounts are grievous, such as 4,000 Basque children evacuated to Britain as Nazi bombers blitzed their cities. Still others tell of blood banks, transfusions, and additional medical innovations by valiant foreign doctors, several of whom returned to their homelands only to face persecution as "premature anti-Fascists." Such anecdotes may well inspire readers to pick up a more substantial analysis, such as Hugh Thomas's classic Spanish Civil War or George Orwell's autobiographical Homage to Catalonia, upon which Rhodes draws.