[Raellus]

Spain in Our Hearts, by Adam Hochschild is about American (and British) volunteers in the Spanish Civil War. It's pretty light on descriptions of battles and combat, but paints really compelling portraits of folks that risked their lives to fight for a cause that they believed in. It also does a really good job of describing the everyday life of foreign volunteers in Republican Spain. This is where it is most applicable to T2K- for most of the war, the International Brigades were poorly supplied in almost every area- food, medicine, and, especially, modern weaponry. They had to do as much as they could with very little (less and less as the war wore on).

Although the book focuses on those who supported the Republican cause (Hemingway and Orwell, to name the most famous), it also profiles a couple of Americans who supported the Nationalists (i.e. fascists), including the CEO of Texaco.

It's a really well-written book- much better (although less exhaustive) than Antony Beevor's, The Battle for Spain, which, IMHO was uncharacteristically dry (and I'm a huge fan of his later work).

I was originally drawn to the Spanish Civil War when I started thinking about whether the U.S.A. could experience and ideologically-driven civil war in the near future. After reading these two books, and following the national news for the last 17 years or so, I've concluded that the possibility is not as remote as I once imagined...