Adam Hochschild

Harvard Book Store and Mass Humanities welcome award-winning and bestselling historian ADAM HOCHSCHILD for a discussion of his latest book, Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939, a sweeping history of the Spanish Civil War, told through a dozen characters, including Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell. It is a tale of idealism, heartbreaking suffering, and a noble cause that failed.

About Spain in Our Hearts

For three crucial years in the 1930s, the Spanish Civil War dominated headlines in America and around the world, as volunteers flooded to Spain to help its democratic government fight off a fascist uprising led by Francisco Franco and aided by Hitler and Mussolini. Today we're accustomed to remembering the war through Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and Robert Capa’s photographs. But Adam Hochschild has discovered some less familiar yet far more compelling characters who reveal the full tragedy and importance of the war: a fiery nineteen-year-old Kentucky woman who went to wartime Spain on her honeymoon, a Swarthmore College senior who was the first American casualty in the battle for Madrid, a pair of fiercely partisan, rivalrous New York Times reporters who covered the war from opposites sides, and a swashbuckling Texas oilman with Nazi sympathies who sold Franco almost all his oil—at reduced prices, and on credit. 

It was in many ways the opening battle of World War II, and we still have much to learn from it. Spain in Our Hearts is Adam Hochschild at his very best.

Praise

“George Orwell once explained that going to Spain, in 1936, ‘seemed the only conceivable thing to do.’ As soon as he got there, the right thing to do got a lot less clear. And how to write about it was immediately difficult, too. The twenty-eight hundred Americans who fought in the Spanish Civil War felt the same way, as Adam Hochschild recounts in this rich and fascinating book. Few writers grapple so powerfully with the painful moral and ethical choices of past actors as does Hochschild, who brings to Spain in Our Hearts his exceptional talents—and his moral seriousness—as a reporter, as a historian, and as a writer.” —Jill Lepore, author of The Secret History of Wonder Woman

“Spain in Our Hearts is narrative non-fiction at its very best. Hochschild’s achievement is to make this trial-by-combat story come alive, as if it were happening now. It is impossible for a reader not to identify and feel compassion for those sons and daughters of America who risked and often gave their lives for a cause that could not ultimately prevail against the darker forces of Franco, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin—and Texaco. A seamlessly-woven, unputdownable tapestry of war in Europe; intensely, unforgettably moving.” —Nigerl Hamilton, author of The Mantle of Command