HOTEL FLORIDA by Amanda Vaill

"Hotel Florida" was chosen as one of the ten best books of the year by the New York Times.  It tells the story of the Spanish Civil War which took place in the late 1930s, just before World War II.  It  presaged the rival ideologies of communism and fascism as if in a horrible preview of what was to rent the world in a few short years.  Eventually the reporters, who flocked to the war to make their reputation and fortune, became famous even as the war was forgotten in the greater conflagration which followed.

Vaill masterfully tells the history of the war through the eyes and writings of three couples who worked with and fell in love with each other.  Robert Capa was a Hungarian photographer who made his reputation there by being one of the first embedded reporters, following the troops from battle to battle.  He was joined by his Polish lover, Gerda Taro, a beautiful, brave and daring photographer whose shots depicted the human side of the residual misery war brings.  Gerda's photos became world famous before she died at age 26, crushed by a tank.  Their story is exciting and heartbreaking.

The Spaniard, Arturo Barea, loyal to the Loyalist government and his girlfriend, the lovely Austrian, Ilsa Kulcsar were press officers for the Republicans.  They worked in constant danger, hated by the Germans and Franco's rebels, and likewise by the Russian communists, who were meddling and carrying out large sums of money from the government coffers. Barea who lost friends and family in the war, had little use for the foreign reporters who hounded his office looking for dispatches they could send back home.

Finally the most famous of all, Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn, equally fearless and hungry for the story and publicity of front page reporting.  Hemingway, especially, is revealed to be a blustering ego-driven blow-hard who was the center of the social scene at the Hotel Florida where reporters and spies gathered nightly to exchange war stories heady with drink and bravado.

The war went on for three years and 400,000 lives were lost, among them young idealistic volunteers from all over the world who came to fight for the Loyalist government which was being crushed by Franco's Italian and German backed money and weapons.  Through it all the Hotel Florida remained standing, a bastion of intrigue, drama, passion and gossip.  Our three couples met and separated here and met again.  We see the war through their eyes and history comes alive thanks to Vaill's precise and interesting writing.  I highly recommend this book to all readers, especially those who would like to learn more about a time in history when young men and women from around the world, fueled by the stories of these reporters, flocked to defend an idealistic government which was doomed from the start.