Book Pick: Hotel Florida, by Amanda Vaill

Subtitled, "Truth, love, and death in the Spanish Civil War," Hotel Florida is not a straight history of that horrendous conflict which killed hundreds of thousands, many in atrocities committed by both sides. Rather, it conveys a sense of the war as experienced by three sets of lovers who fought in or reported on the war for the Loyalist side. The most famous was the power journalistic team of Ernest Hemmingway and his latest fling, Martha Gellhorn, for whom he abandoned his second wife in Key West to report on the war for the American press as a propagandist for the Loyalists. The second pair was photographer Robert Capa who, along with his colleague and mistress Gerda Taro, invented modern photo journalism. Last were Spanish Foreign Press officer Arturo Barea and his Austrian assistant and mistress Ilsa Kulcsar. All three interacted at Madrid's Hotel Florida, the iconic residence and watering hole for the powerful and famous among government leaders, foreign fighters and war chroniclers.  It's difficult to read about the depravation experienced by the Loyalist side, whose cause for democratic reform was crushed by massive German and Italian fascist support for the anti Loyalist rebels led by General Francisco Franco. Spain was truly split between Loyalist and Nationalist forces when Franco combined military, church and landowner interests to overthrow the Spanish Republic. When told that a revolution meant he'd have to kill half of Spain, he replied, "Let the killing begin". Hotel Florida conveys the horror of that pledge, and its implications for the coming worldwide apocalypse that started just two months after Franco's victory. The democracy's refusal to confront Hitler and Mussolini in Spain may have done more than Munich to set up WWII. Painful to read, impossible to put down.