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Amanda Vaill - Hotel Florida (2nd Hand Paperback)
SKU B003268
Availability:
1 available
Original price
£4.70
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Original price
£4.70
Original price
£4.70
£4.70
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£4.70
Current price
£4.70
Synopsis
Subtitled : Truth, Love & Death in The Spanish Civil War.
A spellbinding story of love amid the devastation of the Spanish Civil War. A dazzling portrait of a country at war with itself, told through the tangled lives of six writers who were all to be found sheltering from the shelling in the Hotel Florida during the siege of Madrid.
Madrid, 1936 . . . In a city blasted by a civil war that many fear will cross borders and engulf Europe - a conflict one writer will call "the decisive thing of the century"- six people meet and find their lives changed forever.
Ernest Hemingway, his career stalled, his marriage sour, hopes that this war will give him fresh material and new romance; Martha Gellhorn, an ambitious novice journalist hungry for love and experience, thinks she will find both with Hemingway in Spain. Robert Capa and Gerda Taro, idealistic young photographers based in Paris, want to capture history in the making and are inventing modern photojournalism in the process. And Arturo Barea, chief of the Spanish government's foreign press office, and Ilsa Kulcsar, his Austrian deputy, are struggling to balance truth-telling with loyalty to their sometimes compromised cause - a struggle that places both of them in peril.
Beginning with the cloak-and-dagger plot that precipitated the first gunshots of the war and moving forward month by month to the end of the conflict. Hotel Florida traces the tangled and disparate wartime destinies of these three couples against the backdrop of a critical moment in history: a moment that called forth both the best and the worst of those caught up in it. In this noir landscape of spies, soldiers, revolutionaries, and artists, the shadow line between truth and falsehood sometimes became faint indeed - your friend could be your enemy and honesty could get you (or someone else) killed.
Years later, Hemingway would say, "It is very dangerous to write the truth in war, and the truth is very dangerous to come by."
In Hotel Florida, from the raw material of unpublished letters and diaries, official documents, and recovered reels of film, the celebrated biographer Amanda Vaill has created a narrative of love and reinvention that is, finally, a story about truth: finding it, telling it, and living it - whatever the cost.
Details
- Format : Thick 2nd Hand Paperback
- Condition : Very Good
- Category : Non-Fiction - Autobiography & Biography
- Published : 2014 (This Edition 2015 - Bloomsbury)
- ISBN : 9781408833896
- SKU : B003268
- PPC : SP400gm
- RRP : £9.99
- Quantity Available : 1 only.
External Reviews
"Amanda Vaill has had the inspired idea of telling the story of the Spanish civil war through the eyes of three couples . . . Vaill's style throughout is unusually intimate. She glides into the characters' heads and keeps up the pace with smart asides. This can make it wonderfully exciting . . . Vaill's account of the tragic end of both war and her characters is shocking and wrenchingly sad." - Lara Feigel, The Observer.
"A real delight of her book is the way she evokes the colours and smells both of starving, besieged Madrid and the well-fed opulence of Valencia on the distant Mediterranean coast. Best of all are her characterisations. The life of the sparkling and adventurous Gellhorn, before and after the Spanish civil war." - The Guardian.
"Written with verve and passion, and full of drama, pathos and gossip . . . A fascinating cast." - Daily Telegraph.
"A history that reads like a novel, penned by an academic who writes like a blockbuster. A deeply revealing account of the Spanish Civil War, through the eyes of three sets of lovers: Gerda Taro and Robert Capa's stories are moving; Hemingway and Gellhorn are dislikeable but intriguing; Arturo Barea, the only Spaniard is tragic." - Herald Books of the Year.
"It's a marvellous piece of historical writing, informed by the letters, diaries, fiction, photographs, and films of the time (much of it produced by Vaill's six protagonists), which captures the confusion, the desperation, and the heroism on display; this is history you can immerse yourself in, and knowing the war's wretched outcome lends a sense of tragic irony to events." - Independent on Sunday.
"If you like Spain, politics or just Hemingway, this is your book." - Irish Times.
The Author
Amanda Vaill is a former book publisher and a New York Times bestselling and award-winning biographer, journalist, and screenwriter. Her journalism and criticism have appeared in numerous periodicals, from The American Scholar and Architectural Digest to Travel & Leisure and The Washington Post. A finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, a 1999 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2017 Fellow of the Centre for Ballet and the Arts at New York University, and a 2018-19 Fellow at the Cullman Centre for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, she lives in New York City, and is currently at work on Pride & Pleasure, a dual biography of Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton (wife of Alexander) and her sister Angelica Schuyler Church.