Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War
Amanda Vaill
Aug 2023 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Timothy Andrés Pabon
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17 hr 13 min
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"A vivid, well-paced story of the awfulness of war and of the complex motives of those who report on it." —The Wall Street Journal
"Romantic . . . kaleidoscopic . . . adds to the cold hard facts—as well as the enduring mystique—of the Spanish Civil War." —Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air
Madrid, 1936. In a city blasted by civil war, six people meet and find their lives changed forever. Ernest Hemingway, his career stalled, his marriage sour, hopes this war will give him fresh material and new romance; Martha Gellhorn, an ambitious novice journalist hungry for love and experience, thinks she will find both with Hemingway in Spain. Robert Capa and Gerda Taro, idealistic young photographers based in Paris, are inventing modern photojournalism as they capture history in the making. And Arturo Barea, Madrid's foreign press chief, and Ilsa Kulcsar, his Austrian deputy, are struggling to balance truth-telling with loyalty to their sometimes compromised cause—a struggle that places both of them in peril. Hotel Florida traces the tangled wartime destinies of these three couples against the backdrop of a critical moment in history.
From the raw material of unpublished letters and diaries, official documents, and recovered reels of film, Amanda Vaill has created a narrative of love and reinvention that is, finally, a story about truth: finding it out, telling it, and living it—whatever the cost.
"Romantic . . . kaleidoscopic . . . adds to the cold hard facts—as well as the enduring mystique—of the Spanish Civil War." —Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air
Madrid, 1936. In a city blasted by civil war, six people meet and find their lives changed forever. Ernest Hemingway, his career stalled, his marriage sour, hopes this war will give him fresh material and new romance; Martha Gellhorn, an ambitious novice journalist hungry for love and experience, thinks she will find both with Hemingway in Spain. Robert Capa and Gerda Taro, idealistic young photographers based in Paris, are inventing modern photojournalism as they capture history in the making. And Arturo Barea, Madrid's foreign press chief, and Ilsa Kulcsar, his Austrian deputy, are struggling to balance truth-telling with loyalty to their sometimes compromised cause—a struggle that places both of them in peril. Hotel Florida traces the tangled wartime destinies of these three couples against the backdrop of a critical moment in history.
From the raw material of unpublished letters and diaries, official documents, and recovered reels of film, Amanda Vaill has created a narrative of love and reinvention that is, finally, a story about truth: finding it out, telling it, and living it—whatever the cost.
"A vivid, well-paced story of the awfulness of war and of the complex motives of those who report on it." —The Wall Street Journal
"Romantic . . . kaleidoscopic . . . adds to the cold hard facts—as well as the enduring mystique—of the Spanish Civil War." —Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air
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About the author
Amanda Vaill is a writer and critic whose articles have appeared in the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and magazines such as Esquire and GQ. Vaill's first book, published in 1998, was a biography of an American couple who were part of the Paris "Lost Generation" in the 1920s. In Everybody Was So Young: Gerald and Sara Murphy, A Lost Generation Love Story, Vaill focuses mainly on those years in France, when the Murphys were at the center of a artistic circle that included Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. (Fitzgerald used the Murphys as models for the characters Nicole and Dick Driver in Tender is the Night.) Amanda Vaill lives in New York. Before becoming a full-time writer, she was an executive editor at the Viking Penguin publishing house.
Amanda Vaill is a writer and critic whose articles have appeared in the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and magazines such as Esquire and GQ. Vaill's first book, published in 1998, was a biography of an American couple who were part of the Paris "Lost Generation" in the 1920s. In Everybody ...
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