The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy - Mackenzi Lee

The girl in the blue beret - Bobbie Ann Mason

Hotel Florida - Amanda Vaill

Hotel Florida: true love, death, and the Spanish Civil War - Vaill, Amanda

Summary: "A spellbinding story of love amid the devastation of the Spanish Civil War Madrid, 1936. In a city blasted by a civil war that many fear will cross borders and engulf Europe--a conflict one writer will call "the decisive thing of the century"--six people meet and find their lives changed forever. Ernest Hemingway, his career stalled, his marriage sour, hopes that 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, want to capture history in the making and are inventing modern photojournalism in the process. And Arturo Barea, chief of Madrid's loyalist foreign press office, 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. As Hemingway put it, "You could learn as much at the Hotel Florida in those years as you could anywhere in the world." From the raw material of unpublished letters and diaries, official documents, and recovered reels of film, Amanda Vaill has created a narrative of love and reinvention that is, finally, a story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"-- Provided by publisher.

Booklist Reviews
As if civil war wasn't torturous enough, the Spanish Civil War had the misfortune to become entangled in larger global issues of ideology on the eve of WWII. That subtext added to the complexity of deciphering who was friend or foe as Francisco Franco overthrew the government and leftist rebels fought back. Thousands of miles away, Ernest Hemingway saw the war as a way to revive a flagging career and get back his zest. Martha Gelhorn, an ambitious young journalist, also saw a career opportunity and a chance to make a lover of Hemingway. In Paris, Robert Capa and Gerda Taro, lovers and idealistic photographers, saw a chance to capture history in the infancy of photojournalism. Arturo Barea and Ilsa Kulcsar were press officers torn between telling the truth and struggling to support their crumbling cause. Vaill taps unpublished letters and diaries as well as official documents to bring intimacy and immediacy to a new look at the war from the perspective of three couples whose paths crossed. This is high drama and an assemblage of characters uniquely suited to appreciate and record it. Copyright 2014 Booklist Reviews.

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Catastrophe 1914 - Max Hastings

Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War - Hastings, Max

Summary: A history of the outbreak of World War I from the breakdown of diplomacy to the dramatic battles that occurred before the war bogged down in the trenches.




Booklist Reviews
After writing almost exclusively about WWII, eminent historian Hastings (Inferno) turns his attention to the outbreak of WWI. Chronicling both the prelude to the war and its initial battles, he concentrates on events occurring between June 28, 1914, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo, and December 31, 1914, when soldiers on both sides of the conflict languished in trenches. Drawing on accounts generated from rarified diplomatic circles, seasoned military leaders, and ordinary citizens helplessly caught up in the international catastrophe, he examines the origins and the onset of the Great War in minute and vivid detail. Hastings, unlike many contemporary historians, refuses to indulge in any retrospective hand-wringing, concluding rather firmly that Germany and Austria must accept principal blame for the war and that it is an analytical and an ethical mistake to believe that it did not matter which side won. This compelling reexamination of the commencement of the conflict represents an important contribution to the scholarship of the "war to end all wars."

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Danubia - Simon Winder

Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe - Winder, Simon

Summary: A lively, informative chronicle of the influential Habsburg family from the end of the Middle Ages to World War I traces their role in a colorful range of traditions, horrors, and curiosities.




Booklist Reviews
The Habsburg Empire was a ramshackle, lumbering old giant centered in the Danube Valley that held a central place in European politics from the Middle Ages to the end of WWI, ruled by the dominant dynasty of Europe for four centuries, the Habsburg family. Winder set out to wander through the lands that used to constitute the empire, describing and reflecting on what he sees now, particularly in terms of the appearance of villages, towns, and cities, and what he knows through his research as to how things used to look when the Habsburgs held sway. The sentiment around which he builds his colorful narrative is that the longevity of the Habsburg dynasty was due to a mix of cunning, dimness, luck and brilliance. (About one particular archduke, Winder says, he was one of the Habsburgs who make the family worthwhile, who make up for all the pious timeservers who congest the family tree.) This personalized, almost you-are-there view of history results in an arresting combination of anecdote and scholarly examination, where the interests of serious armchair travelers and devoted students of European history meet.

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1913 - Florian Illies

1913: the year before the storm - Illies, Florian

Summary: A month-by-month history of the year 1913, chronicling the important cultural and political events that took place.

Library Journal Reviews
Although some in Europe were superstitious that 1913 would be an unlucky year, it proved to be one of change, possibility, and progress. German journalist Illies vividly re-creates Western society before the war by constructing a month-by-month narrative made up of quirky snippets about happenings of all sorts—cultural, technological, biographical. In some ways it was a world brimming with newness and optimism—modern art was emerging, geothermia was being discovered, a drug later nicknamed "ecstasy" was synthesized, Detroit rolled out its first assembly line, and the Federal Reserve was founded. Geniuses abounded: Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Rainer Maria Rilke, Sigmund Freud, and D.H. Lawrence. Albert Schweitzer was planning to visit Africa. While culture takes center stage in this microhistory, readers are also alerted to portents of political trouble: Stalin was in Vienna, soon to meet Trotsky, while Hitler was painting watercolors and looking for his big break. Some, such as Rudolf Steiner, felt that "the war keeps threatening to come." Others were sure it could not happen. The rich range of subjects, the vibrancy of the writing, here translated by Whiteside and Searle, and the intimate details of the biographies all make this a fast-paced and engrossing read. VERDICT For general readers interested in history, art, culture, and literature. Highly recommended.—Marie M. Mullaney, Caldwell Coll., NJ

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The sleepwalkers - Christopher M. Clark

The sleepwalkers: how Europe went to war in 1914 - Clark, Christopher M.

Summary: An authoritative chronicle, drawing on new research on World War I, traces the paths to war in a minute-by-minute narrative that examines the decades of history that informed the events of 1914.


Booklist Reviews
The immense documentation of the origin of WWI, remarks historian Clark, can be marshaled to support a range of theses, and it but weakly sustains, in the tenor of his intricate analysis, the temptation to assign exclusive blame for the cataclysm to a particular country. Dispensing with a thesis, Clark interprets evidence in terms of the character, internal political heft, and external geopolitical perception and intention of a political actor. In other words, Clark centralizes human agency and, especially, human foibles of misperception, illogic, and emotion in his narrative. Touching on every significant figure in European diplomacy in the decade leading to August 1914, Clark underscores an entanglement of an official's fluctuating domestic power with a foreign interlocutor's appreciation, accurate or not, of that official's ability to make something stick in foreign policy. As narrative background, Clark choreographs the alliances and series of crises that preceded the one provoked by the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, but he focuses on the men whose risk-taking mistakes detonated WWI. Emphasizing the human element, Clark bestows a tragic sensibility on a magisterial work of scholarship. Copyright 2012 Booklist Reviews.

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