Spain Books

This is the most accurate travel book that I've ever used. The prices for lodging and meals were correct (a rarity in travel books!) and directions were clear and accurate. Having used both Frommers and Lonely Planet, I still feel that this series, and particularly this Spain and Portugal guide, is the best bet. Although Fodor's contains more history and other books provide more maps, this Let's Go guide is really all you need. Local tourist offices easily provide the rest. This series is particularly suited to the traveller who hopes to spend between US $35-$60 per day. However, there are many options for cheaper or more expensive plans.

My daughter gave me the Let's Go Madrid Map Guide before my husband and I left for Madrid this spring. I had given her Let's Go Europe years ago and had always regarded it as a college student's guide. But we were on a tight budget and so we brought it along. What a pleasant surprise! The maps were great and there is so much information about everything in that little booklet. And it is so nice and small -- it fit right in my purse. I loved not having to carry around a big book all the time. Best of all, the good directions saved us from having to use our awful Spanish. This is certainly a great find for anyone who plans on spending a few days in and around Madrid.

Helen Nader's 1990 book, Liberty in Absolutist Spain: The Habsburg Sale of Towns, 1516-1700, we are introduced to many case studies that are lifelike and full of a lot of detail. Nader introduces the term perpetual decentralization as a way of describing the political infactions in Habsburg Spain. During times of desperate need such as funding a war, the authorities needed to make timely tax pickups. This information is new in the field of Habsburg studies. Habsburg studies had not been a hot topic since the nineteenth century but Nader has brought it to the forefront.
Nader illustrates who the Castilian villages obtained charters which gave them municipal status and their struggle to maintain their independence. This struggle is mirrored by another society that existed during their same period, and that is the America's. Considering the two societies came into contact via Columbus, it is not mentioned. Nader does not discuss the 'outer world' but rather focuses on Castile under the Habsburgs. She does however, relate the Habsburg rule to that of all of Spain. She compares the towns that maintained their autonomy to those that lost theirs to the government.

This book offers a new perspective of absolutism that William Beik does not cover. Nader's analysis is a breath of fresh air for anyone that has had to read article after article about absolutism, she brings the idea that absolutism is not an entirely bad thing rather it is benefiticial to both the government and society.

Libro de buen amor, by Juan Ruiz, Arcipreste de Hita. Edited by Alberto Blecua for Letras Hispánicas. ISBN 8437610117.

Ordinarily I do not review books which I have not finished reading; but because this edition of the Libro de buen amor has received no reviews, and because my review will deal primarily with the edition and not with the work itself, I'll add my two cents.

Here's the table of contents:

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Introducción
El hilo narrativo
La fecha y el autor
La invención
El artista
Manuscritos y ediciones
Los problemas textuales
Errores separativos de ±
Errores de ± o de x
Errores no significativos de x
La rama S
Intervenciones de Paradinas
Las innovaciones de la rama S
La rama G
La rama T
El problema de las dos redacciones
La lengua del arquetipo
La métrica
Criterios de Edicion
El texto
Las variantes
Notas

Libro de buen amor (Blecua here lists each section by title and page number)

Variantes graficas y lingüísticas
Notas suplementarias
Indice de voces
Indice de nombres propios

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As can be seen from the contents, Blecua does a thorough job discussing the textual problems of the LBA, and it's dry going unless you're interested in textual criticism. He also devotes seven pages to the meter, which along with the text, is "el otro gran problema que plantea el LBA." The metrical discussion, which of course assumes a basic knowledge of Spanish prosody, is of more practical use to the average reader than the textual one. For attempting to tackle the LBA without understanding the meter is as preposterous as reading Shakespeare and not knowing why he placed line breaks where he did.

The copious notes are of course designed for the SPANISH-SPEAKING undergraduate, and so idioms which might escape a native English speaker are not explained. Blecua explains his procedure thus: "[. . .] he puesto dos tipos de notas: unas, a pie de pagina, para el lector mas lego; otras, en el apendice, para discutir con la clerecia experta." The footnotes sometimes gloss one word, sometimes half a line, sometimes whole lines: anything which might present "dificultades para un estudiante de bachillerato." Since not all readers begin at the beginning and read the LBA through, he repeats throughout common glosses such as "inmediatamente" for "luego," "hora sexta" for "siesta," and "bienes materiales" for "algo." The endnotes are primarily philological and rather technical. The bibliography is thirty pages, and cites works in Spanish, English, French, and German.

The language of the text is not modernized, but the spelling is slightly modernized. Blecua replaces the long s and sigma with the modern `s,' reduces double consonants, and modernizes the usage of `u' and `v.' He preserves, however, the `c' with cedilla, along with other characteristics of fourteenth-century Spanish.

Here are the first two stanzas according to Blecua's edition (the brackets are his):

Señor Dios, que a los jodíos, pueblo de perdiçión,
sacaste de cabtivo del poder de Far[aón],
a Danïel sacaste del poço de Babilón:
saca a mí, coitado, d'esta mala presión.

Señor, tú diste gracia a Ester la reína,
ante el rey Asüero ovo tu graçia digna.
Señor, dame tu graçia e tu merçed aína,
sácame d'esta lazeria, d'esta presión [...ina].

The numbering of the stanzas is continuous throughout.

All in all, it's an excellent edition of the Libro de buen amor. I give it five stars because it combines excellent scholarship with a low price. Students might be better advised to start with Libro de buen amor), which is glossed in English. You can view sample pages at http://www.linguatextltd.com/europeanmasterpieces/cervantes/pdf/LBA-KIRBYpreview.pdf. And there's also Cejador's venerable edition for the Clásicos Castellanos series, out-of-print but available for free on Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/16625/16625-h/16625-h.htm).

This is a short 83-page book about the Spanish Inquisition. It doesn't focus on details about what day-to-day life was like at the time, as the title might suggest, but is rather a brief and easy-to-read history book. It seems aimed at elementary-school classrooms, but is interesting and well-written enough to be a good introduction to the subject for adults as well.

Pedro Calderon de la Barca is one of the great playwrights of the Renaissance, and his La Vida es Sueño, or Life is a Dream, is at the top of nearly everyone's list of Calderon's "Greatest Hits." Depicting the revolt of a Polish prince imprisoned by his father because of a prophecy that the boy would one day endanger the realm, this three act play has been translated into English more than a dozen times in the last century alone, but this is the first version I have seen that is not only faithful to the letter of the text but to the form and feeling of the play in the pleasure of the reading moment. In a monumental act of poetic ventriloquy, the translator Gregary Racz has miraculously managed to reproduce the exact rhyme scheme of this "Golden Age" masterpiece in an elegantly metrical English that echoes the original Spanish line for line, all 3319 of them. Vide this snippet from the closing soliloquy of ACT II.

What's life? Not anything it seems.
A shadow. Fiction filling reams.
All we possess on earth means nil,
for life's a dream, think what you will,
and even all our dreams are dreams.

I predict Racz's Life is a Dream will have an immensely long shelf-life and a brilliant career on the Anglo-American stage.

One of the unique strengths of a history book by William Loren Katz is the rare photographs that usually accompany the text. Books like “The Black West” and “Black Indians” immediately come to mind. And he has done it again with “The Lincoln Brigade: A Picture History”, a series of compelling portraits of the brave Americans who volunteered to fight with the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War in an army named after the great American emancipator. The photos, which contain riveting images of black and white Americans cooperating in armed struggle against the rise of fascism in Spain, is accompanied by a highly informative, succinctly written text by Katz and Afro-American journalist, the late Marc Crawford. It is a beautifully produced book that is an excellent introduction for the reader with little prior knowledge of that great conflict between fascism and democracy that presaged World War II. In the preface to “The Lincoln Brigade” NYU historian Robin D.G. Kelley argues the fundamental importance of the Spanish conflict to the worldwide conflagration that followed. Says Kelley, “My students generally know nothing about the Spanish Civil War, but they follow my lines of reasoning…But when I tell them that nearly 3,000 volunteers traveled to Spain to defend the Republican government from fascist forces, and that they were joined by another 35,000 from around the globe, that is when I lose them…They cannot fathom why anyone in their right mind would travel half way across the world to fight, and possibly die, for a country that is not their own.” This volume answers that question. Divided into three parts and fourteen chapters, the book describes the political and economic conditions that prevailed in America and Europe at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, the nature of the war itself, and what kind of reception the American vets got upon their return home after the triumph of General Franco’s fascist forces in Spain, then follows them into the World War and beyond. One of the most fascinating chapters in this book is “Volunteers,” which presents a series of brief profiles of some of those who fought. The first thing that will surprise most readers is that they are quite a mixed bag. “Most came from cities in large states,” the author tells us. “The largest group comprised members of trade unions, especially seamen. The second largest was made up of college students and professors. Dozens called themselves artists—writers, poets, painters, dancers, musicians, and three acrobats. There were Catholics, Protestants, Japanese, Chinese, Afro-Americans, and Native Americans. In the age of Hitler, Jews made up 30 percent of the Lincoln Brigade. There were Democrats, Republicans, Socialists, Communists, and people who rejected any kind of labels.” With minimal training and equipped with hand-me-down weapons and uniforms from many national armies around Europe, these volunteers went into combat and fought gallantly for an ideal that inspired those who prized freedom and democracy the world over. The descriptions of various battles are so detailed that it is as if we are there. And the photographs in this volume capture some poignant moments from that grand struggle to decide whether democracy or fascism would triumph in the world...The grotesquely beautiful photo by Robert Capa of a Republican soldier taken at the moment of death by gunfire is said to be the most famous picture of the Spanish Civil War, and deservedly so. But this book is full of powerful pictures of every aspect of the Lincoln Brigade’s struggles, the defeats and triumphs, and the learned text helps bring them to life. This book is a splendid way to introduce the Spanish Civil War to the novice, and an invaluable keepsake for surviving veterans, their families, and other partisans seeking a memoir of the heroic saga of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade...

This splendid book is a must for anyone interested in Spanish-German relations over the last several hundred years. Since Spain was long part of the Habsburg Empire, and since Franco's Spain was allied with Hitler's Germany, those relations are both complex and significant. The book's 21 essays cover three periods: The Middle Ages and Habsburg years, the Enlightenment, and from the Spanish Civil War to the present. Most are well written and contain useful bibliography. In addition, 38 pages are devoted to bibliography on German-Spanish relations and there are good onomastic and subject indices. I was particularly taken by the essays linking literary traditions (Kabbala and mysticism, Calderón and German theater, Schlegel and Cervantes, Heine, Unamuno, Neruda, etc.), and by Conrad Kent's well-illustrated essay on the Spanish Civil War as interpreted by German photographers.

One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of several generations of a Colombian family while supernatural occurrences and unbelievable events are described with unblinking sincerity. Marquez, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982, commands such mastery of language that his prose reads like verse. The beauty of his words wraps the reader inextricably into the fates of the Buendias. Their loves, their wars, their brutality, their death and dreams, are all told with Marquez's special gift of prose. One Hundred Years of Solitude is probably Marquez's finest work, destined to be a classic of world literature.

read it wiht your child and you will see an amazing thing happen to your childs ability to talk about feelings to you with out hesatation. just give it a try you will see what i have expereanced. i wish i had this for my first child.

thank you