Spain Books

This amazing "Book 2" companion to David Spain's "Noritake Collectibles, A to Z : A Pictorial Record & Guide to Values" is truly a great piece of work. As if the first book were not stunning and wonderful enough, with it's easy, breezy organization and thoroughly impressive pictures numbering over 1000, this second one wows audiences yet again with it's amazingly clever organization and truly beautiful pictures, many taken (as in the first book) by the author himself. Quite the icing on the cake. Spain's writing genius shines through.

I am a student in Spanish at NYU and had read this book before but only recently, via a book called LUCKY, realized how interconnected the world of literature can be. This writer, Russell Sebold, is the father of the woman (I forget her first name, April?) who wrote a great book about rape called LUCKY. After reading CADALSO I can see that the younger Sebold was blessed to have such an intelligent and passionate father. They both write marvelously and the way the novel, LUCKY, lets us into their real lives is fascinating for this Spanish scholar. Family is amazing as is the literature that one family can create.

To my knowledge, this is the most rigorous biography of Columbus so far. It is basically an unknown story, since what they teach us in school is almost all of it lies and myths, for example that Queen Elizabeth sold her jewells to finance the first trip, or that everybody in Columbus' time believed the Earth was flat. By any standard, Columbus was a bit of a lunatic who probably also suffered from what todat we call bipolar disease (for example, he thought that God spoke to him directly). He seems to have been given to theatricality and emotional blackmail, but undoubtedly he was also very intelligent and a great navigator. He also had an urge for social climbing, and he longed for glory and fame more than for money. He was obsessed with finding a way to China, India and Japan by sailing West, which suited the Western European powers's commercial interests. As said before, in his time the great debate among learned people was not over the flatness or roundness of the Earth, but about its size. Columbus, by grossly underestimating it, became convinced that the voyage to Asia was within reach. Had there been no American continent, he would have been murdered or starved to death. But he was also a very courageous and brave man, and so he made possible what seemed impossible. He was a very bad politician, and his emotional diseases made him quarrel with soon former friends, which of course marred his leadership abilities. His life, very well written by Fernandez-Armesto, is a glorious, tragic and incredible epic which reads like the best adventure novels.

There are many books on Columbus but none surpass the quality of the writing and the way the authors lay out the history of the great discovery including what led Columbus to his decision to sail west into an unknown sea. His dealings with Spain's royalty and his later misfortunes are put in context with the times he lived in. A real pleasure to read.

Parte de la Comedia Lacrimosa

It remains one of the great mysteries of history how the Spanish Civil War came to be viewed as a struggle of Democracy versus Fascism, when, in fact, it was actually a battle between Soviet Communism and Conservative Reactionaries. Part of the explanation can be found in Richardson's excellent little book, which describes how, through and through, the International Brigades were creatures of the Kremlin, with the sole intent the sovietization of Spain. He tells the tale of the recruitment of this Red Foreign Legion, which had two main goals; the defense of the Spanish Rrepublic and as a propaganda and training tool to promote international communism.
While many if not most in the media today continue to characterize Franco as the fascist bad guy, aided by Hitler and Mussolini, this conflict demonstrates how fuzzy the whole issue of fascism vs democracy vs communism really was back then. As it turns out, Hitler was absolutely right in his assertion that Spain had to be saved from Bolshevism, am opinion that the western democracies blithely ignored. Unfortunately, many Spaniards have been so propagandized to hate Franco that the truth has been obscured. And it is today simply politically unthinkable to even suggest that Hitler could have actually done the right thing while democratic stalwarts like Roosevelt did nothing but mouth platitudes.
Reichardson's book is an outstanding example of how personal recollections and archival research can create a compelling view of a significant aspect of a little-known war. Highly recommended to any student of communism or pre-war Europe.

Ian Robertson wrote the Blue Guides to Spain and Portugal and was noted for including fascinating detail often overlooked by other historians. In his newest book, A Commanding Presence: Wellington in the Peninsula 1808-1814, the author again includes detail sadly missing from most Peninsular War histories, such as the important contribution by the King's German Legion. Anyone trying to educate himself about the Peninsular War may well wonder why it took so long to drive Napoleon's army from Iberia. And why so many soldiers died in so few battles. Robertson tells us of the nearly insurmountable problems facing the allied commander, the Duke of Wellington: starvation, disease and a lack of everything from boots to transport and munitions. 2008 is the 200th anniversary of the beginning of the Peninsular War and there is much interest in this crucial part of the Napoleonic Wars. A Commanding Presence tells us what happened and also gives the reader a behind-the-scenes insight into how difficult it was to wage war two centuries ago.

If American labor history during the second half of the twentieth century had high priests, it is safe to call David Brody one of them. Among students of union-management relations, working class life and culture, and the place of the state in industrial labor relations from the end of the nineteenth century to the close of the second world, coming to terms with his understandings of how the Steel industry in the United States operated is an absolute necessity. His 1969 publication Labor in Crisis: The Steel Strike of 1919, is a more fleshed out treatment of the American Federation of Labor's failed attempt to force union recognition upon the steel industry, which he dealt with in the closing chapter of his path breaking 1960 study Steelworkers in America: The Non-Union Era. Labor in Crisis asks a two deceptively simple question that can only justly be answered with varying levels of complexity: First, why did the events of 1919 play out as they did? Second, what mechanisms fell in to place less than two decades later that allowed the Steel Workers Organizing Committee to gain a contract with the United States Steel Corporation without a fight?

Brody begins his explanation of the dramatic events of 1919 more than a quarter of a century before in Homestead, Pennsylvania during the violent and ultimately losing strike which the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers waged against Carnegie Steel in 1892. Beyond simply treating the strike at Homestead as a touchstone that ex-plains the negligible place which labor unions would have for most of the next forty-five years by explaining how the lost strike represented a shift in power materially in the owners favor, he goes deeply into the mindsets of the so-called "practical" men of steel: Andrew Carnegie, Henry C. Frick, Charles Schwab. Though Carnegie was dead, Frick was dying, and only Schwab was still highly active in the industry as head of Bethlehem Steel by that time, all left a powerful mark upon the whole industry.

The lessons they took away from their experiences in dealing with the hyper-competitive steel market of late nine-teenth century America was that only management, unhindered by any contractual obligations to its workforce, could hope to cope with vicissitudes of the market and remain profitable. Coupled with technological advancement and the massive immigration of unskilled labor from Southern and Eastern Europe to Steel towns throughout the Midwest, the trade unions of the time were in no position to keep management from any of their prerogatives. Though Brody points out that there was long a finance capital side to the Steel industry that was nowhere near as hostile to organized labor as those involved in the practical making of it, they were decidedly junior partners.

With the onset of the Great War, and especially with the United States entrance into it during the (somewhat) pro-labor Wilson administration, organized labor and workers in general, found the situation in the Steel industry very much altered. With the Federal government insisting upon labor peace and forcing recognition of workers' shop committees down the throats of companies who wanted military contracts, various unions were able to easily gain control of these outlets for bargaining about wages and conditions of employment. Had the war lasted longer, postulates Brody, a great many of the changes that were made in the Steel industry during the Great Depression and World War II may very well have been achieved in next few years, or even months. As fate had it, the war ended in November 1918, and all major and, nearly all minor, companies in the industry began taking extremely hard lines against known and suspected activists and sympathizers. Over the next ten months high levels of organizing and varying levels of repression would take place in Steel towns throughout the country, and the trade unionists who were organizing that labor force would feel them-selves compelled to call for a strike that they almost to a man felt they could not win.

As Brody explains the Strike in September of 1919, the event broke down as two different conflicts; one fought publicly and another fought privately. Within the public space, you had the Steel industry most publicly represented in the person of Elbert Gary, the grandfatherly and exceedingly polite head of the United States Steel Corporation, who framed the issue of the strike as a question of whom would actually manage the industry. His pronouncements about the strike and the industry were more widely covered than any other steel mans'. On the labor side, three people tended to crop up as representing workers. Samuel Gompers, long time head of the American Federation of Labor; John Fitzpatrick, head of the Chicago Federation of Labor and acting Chairman of the committee overseeing organization of steel workers; and finally William Z. Foster, Secretary Treasurer of the CFL and the committee responsible for organizing steel workers and an utterly brilliant union tactician and strategist. Though Foster had the least real decision making power of the three, the fact that he was formerly a member of the much feared Industrial Workers of the World and was unrepentant in his radicalism during a post-war red scare made him a lightning rod for criticism--Foster would soon join the American Communist Party and, by the end of World War II, be head of it.

The private side of the conflict occurred in the streets of Steel towns throughout the country. More than a dozen strikers were killed, and civil rights and liberties violations were recorded throughout the country. The situation could only be described as industrial warfare. Throughout Western Pennsylvania, but also in Gary, Indiana and Lackawanna, New York insurgency against entrenched power of both political and industrial nature took place with the most violent consequences, and sometimes even short term political change--Lackawanna, New York elected its one and only Socialist Mayor in November 1919, and Buffalo steel workers put a Socialist on the Common Council. Mostly though, the private war on organized labor and their own workforce led to a demoralization of most of the workers involved in the strike, and showed to what lengths organized capital and often the state were willing to go to assert their power.

Brody's postscript dealing with the anti-climactic organization of the industry, beginning in 1937, illuminates the strike even more by showing just how much the industry had changed by the Great Depression. Without going into great detail, nearly all the circumstances that had made Steel impenetrable to organized labor after World War I had changed drastically in the 1920's and even more so in the thirties with the onset of the Great Depression and New Deal legislation. In many ways the strike in 1919 was the last major strike against an industry that had its formative experiences in the nineteenth century before that guard retired or died. Brody shows with great clarity that the game had changed radically and abruptly. This is a perfectly reasonable explanation.

"Luis J. Rodríguez, an important new voice, writes of the barrio, the steel mills and gangs...In his bag of tools, his words, Rodríguez knows just which to use to chisel well-sculpted poetry. His is the gift of sharing." --Sara Sanderson, The Indianapolis News

"...the poems in this volume...have a brutal yet shimmering intensity that registers the poignant humor and pathos of many Chicanos' lives." --Anne C. Bromley, American Book Review

"This poetry is of the barrio yet stubbornly refuses to be confined in it--Rodríguez' perceptive gaze and storyteller's gift transport his world across neighborhood boundaries." --Publishers Weekly

On the one hand, this book is a meticulous reconstruction of a now almost apocryphal event: the Defeat of the Spanish Aramada. On the other hand, it is a finely told story of suspense and adventure. And finally, it is a superb tale of the days when Spain was the Master of the World, England was hanging on by its fingernails, and wooden ships were not yet the miracles of technology that they later came to be in the days of Nelson.

I love the detail and connections in this book! For example, the author of Don Quixote, Cervantes, was involved in events leading up to the Spanish Armada(s). We learn more about Elizabeth I's (told from a decidedly UNsympathetic historian's point of view) and Sir Francis Drake's (who comes off as a superbly competent though self-interested risen-from-the-common-ranks adventurer) roles. We learn MUch more about Phillip II, King of Spain and effective secular Master of the Western World (until, that is, the defeats of his Armadas).

Sailing in the 1500's was so much a matter of luck, timing, logistics, weather, and fortitude. New naval technologies and strategies were in their infant states. The Spanish had the popular vote to win. The English had the technology (guns and gunnery) if only they had the food. Poor planning on the Spanish side and supremely fortunate timing on the English side managed to counteract English budget frugalities and supplier shenanigans.

In the end it is a rip-roaring story, all the more enthralling for the details. Hanson builds the story masterfully: element by element, personality by personality, circumstance by circumstance... from Phillip's "brainstorm" to invade England, to the climactic sequence of battle encounters as both fleets were pushed along the English Channel by wind and storm.

It's hard indeed to remember how uncertain setting sail was back then. This was the same era as the setting of Clavell's "Shogun" book - Blackthorne the devil-take-all English pilot and his precious navigation Rutters. Galleons and Arquebuses ruled back then. Oh my!