Homage to Catalonia
Orwell's memoir of fighting in the Spanish Civil War, and of watching the revolution he believed in turn on itself.
Orwell went to Spain in 1936 to report on the civil war and ended up fighting for the Republican side, where he was wounded in the throat. His account describes the mud and boredom of the front, the brief hope of a genuine social revolution, and the bitter factional violence that turned allies into targets. Ignored when it appeared, the book is now read as one of his most honest and clear-eyed works.
Recommended by 3 People
Guy Raz
He wasn’t one of these reporters who would interview the killer and the victim with equal weight. He believed there were times when one side was wrong. Like the Holocaust. You wouldn’t interview a member of the Einsatzgruppen and then one of the victims and get two sides of that story. There aren’t a whole lot of cases in history where it’s so clear-cut, but Orwell saw the Spanish Civil War as one of those cases.
Interview · March 2011
Timothy Garton Ash
Interview · April 2011
Timothy Snyder
It is to do with the immediate violence of Soviet means which were visible to Orwell at that time and place. That’s the second thing which I find important about the book as a precursor to dissident literature. To the end of dissident literature, in the seventies and eighties, people defended themselves by making observations and elementary distinctions, preserving certain concepts, not allowing things to be vague.
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