Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com

Average Customer Rating:

Words that say more than pictures

Customer Rating:

This is a beautiful book. It paints a picture of a country 'at war with itself', it doesn't preach, contain prose of sluttish empathy, but it does bring across the misery and degradation of moments captured on the page - moments that echo in the reader, reminding us that the grinding misery, boredom and callous cruelty of war is not contained within the dramatic, brief flash of cannon and rattle of sabres, but is steteched out in such a way that it becomes mundane, banal, and utterly smothering of the humanity that we take for granted. I can't reccomend this book more highly.

Beautifull and haunting

Customer Rating:

This is Lee's third and final installment of his autobiographical trilogy. Unlike Orwell, Borkenau or Hemmingway, Lee was not a middleclass young man with a private income. He was a worker-poet, and this life experience, combined with his remarkable talent with the english language, brings across an incredible clarity and immediacy to his writing that earlier english authors all too often lacked. They say a picture paints a thousand words, but a book such as this tells much more than pictures ever could. This book paints a worms eye view of a country 'at war with itself', the suffering and brutalisation of the the experience of the people he meets is all the more vivid because it is banal - theres no melodrama. Its just there, just a fact, like mud. If you have an interest in the Spanish War then this is a vital addition to your library, but if you just enjoy good literature then this is also a book you shouldn't die without having read.