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Title: Read this if you are traveling to Barcelona
Review: I read Orwell's memoir in preparation for (and during) my second visit to Barcelona. Orwell is so English in his outlook, and clearly loves the people of Catalonia. The book is an excellent review of many of the issues involved in the Spanish Civil war, and how people's fates were decided so clearly by expediency and political whim. Having read _Animal Farm_ and _1984_ as required reading in some prehistoric educational experience, it was refreshing to be inside the head of a much more personal Orwell than I remembered. It was also particularly meaningful to read about places with which I was becoming increasingly familiar. The book was written before the end of the Civil War, and published around the time of Orwell's death in 1950, but it feels so very much in the present. I would place this little book and Zafon's _Shadow of the Wind_ on the "must read" list for anyone either planning to visit or recently returned from Barcelona.
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