War Is Beautiful: An American Ambulance Driver in the Spanish Civil War Contributor(s): Neugass, James (Author) |
|
ISBN: 1595584277 ISBN-13: 9781595584274 Publisher: New Press OUR PRICE: $24.26 Product Type: Hardcover Published: November 2008 Annotation: Neugass, an American ambulance driver in the Spanish Civil War, chronicled his service as a member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. This newly discovered journal of his experience on the front lines is being published for the first time. |
Additional Information |
BISAC Categories: - Biography & Autobiography | Personal Memoirs - History | Europe - Spain & Portugal |
Dewey: B |
LCCN: 2008023065 |
Physical Information: 1.02" H x 6.22" W x 9.46" (1.34 lbs) 336 pages |
Themes: - Chronological Period - 1930's - Cultural Region - Spanish |
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
Publisher Description: The newly discovered journal of an award-winning poet's experience on the front lines as a member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade--All Quiet on the Western Front for the Spanish Civil War In 1937, James Neugass, a poet and novelist praised in the New York Times, joined 2,800 other passionate young Americans who traveled to Spain as part of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade--an unlikely mix of artists, journalists, industrial workers, and intellectuals united in their desire to combat European fascism. Although rumors persisted over the years that Neugass had written a memoir, the manuscript of War Is Beautiful, a nuanced and deeply poetic chronicle of his service as an ambulance driver, did not come to light for sixty years, until a bookseller discovered it among papers in a New England house once occupied by the radical critic and editor Max Eastman. The memoir combines fast-paced accounts of darting onto battlefields to pick up the wounded with elegiac renderings of days spent on alert in an ever-changing series of sharply observed Spanish towns, enduring that most difficult of wartime activities: waiting. Published now for the first time, War Is Beautiful is poised to take its place alongside works by Erich Maria Remarque, Irčne Némirovsky, Wilfred Owen, and George Orwell as a transcendent contemporaneous rendering of wartime life. It includes some of Neugass's own photos taken while in Spain. |