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Title: Horrendous. Poorly written, wandering, and moralistic.
Review: I usually enjoy the volumes in the VSI series from Oxford University Press, but this is a glaring exception. The author, as other reviewers have noted, seeks out less to provide a history of the conflict then to paint a ringing endorsement of the Spanish Republicans. As someone with very little background knowledge in the conflict, this bias is still glaringly obvious. In addition, the book is horrendously written, with random scatterings of text boxes, superfluous use of quotations to ridicule nationalist positions, and slapshod organization. I have turned instead to Antony Beevor's "Spanish Civil War", which, while in many ways sympathetic to the left (as I am myself) at least attempts to reach a nuanced understanding of the conflict. Negative stars.
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