The Passionate War: The Narrative History of the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939

Wyden takes you through the war from the beginning and lays out the actors, events and facts while consistently finding irony in the fog of war and fate. The trap the author avoids is recanting dry dates and facts in meaningless detail. This is what gave history a bad name. This book reads like a novel, no small achievement. What he does achieve is a balanced presentation of the motivations, actors and events using his main characters to clearly illustrate what happened. I am very grateful that Wyden defines the leftist authors and rightest authors early in the book, Wyden successfully navigates a fact based course in the middle. Fun read, you will have to do some additional research if you want the figures or a lot of detail for some events; Wyden only provides it when necessary to understand the significance of a turning point.