Author Talk with Adam Hochschild

On Thurs. evening, August 25th at 6:30 p.m. award-winning author Adam Hochschild will be presenting a talk on his latest book, Spain in our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939, in LPL’s Callahan Hall.

In his new work Hochschild offers a fascinating account of the Spanish Civil War, the only time that nearly 3,000 Americans joined someone else’s civil war against the wishes of their own country. Volunteers flooded to Spain to help its democratic government fight off a fascist uprising led by Francisco Franco and aided by Hitler and Mussolini. “All of us who care about social justice feel a need for political ancestors,” Hochschild writes, “and surely, it seems, that’s what these [volunteers] were.”

Today we’re accustomed to remembering the war through Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, George Orwell’s memoirs, and Robert Capa’s photographs. But Adam Hochschild has discovered some less familiar yet equally compelling characters who reveal the full tragedy and importance of the war, including: 

• a fiery nineteen-year-old Kentucky woman whose honeymoon in wartime Spain turned into an extended stay
• 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 opposite sides
• and a swashbuckling Texas oilman with Nazi sympathies who sold Franco almost all his oil — at reduced prices, and on credit.

 

“Few American volunteers doubted that they were fighting the first battle of the world war to come, and they were right,” Hochschild remarks. It was in many ways the inaugural conflict of World War II, and we still have much to learn from it.

Adam Hochschild is the author of seven books and a cofounder of [the magazine] Mother Jones. King Leopold’s Ghost was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, as was his recent To End All Wars, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Bury the Chains was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the PEN USA Literary Award. He lives in Berkeley, California where he is a professor at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

Hochschild’s presentation will be followed by a Q&A, book sale and book signing. For more information, contact the LPL Adult & Teen Services Desk at 513-3135 or LPLReference@gmail.com