Adam Hochschild

A sweeping history of the Spanish Civil War, told through nine American and British characters including Hemingway and George Orwell. It was a war between fascism, communism, and democracy that preceeded World War II, and a tale of idealism and a noble cause that failed.

"From the bestselling author of King Leopold's Ghost and Spain in Our Hearts comes the astonishing but forgotten story of an immigrant sweatshop worker who married an heir to a great American fortune and became one of the most charismatic radical leaders of her time"-- Rose Pastor arrived in New York City in 1903, a Jewish refugee from Russia who had worked in cigar factories since the age of eleven. Two years later, she captured headlines across...

From the author of the widely acclaimed King Leopold's Ghost comes the taut, gripping account of one of the most brilliantly organized social justice campaigns in history-the fight to free the slaves of the British Empire. In early 1787, twelve men-a printer, a lawyer, a clergyman, and others united by their hatred of slavery-came together in a London printing shop and began the world's first grass-roots movement, battling for the rights of people...

In the late 1890s, Edmund Dene Morel, a young British shipping company agent, noticed something strange about the cargoes of his company’s ships as they arrived from and departed for the Congo, Leopold II’s vast new African colony. Incoming ships were crammed with valuable ivory and rubber. Outbound ships carried little more than soldiers and firearms. Correctly concluding that only slave labor on a vast scale could account for these cargoes,...

Eighteenth-century Britain was the world's leading centre for the slave trade. Profits soared and fortunes were made, but in 1788 things began to change. 'Bury The Chains' tells the remarkable story of the men who sought to end slavery and brought the issue to the heart of British political life.

"Over the course of his career, George Orwell wrote about many things, but no matter what he wrote the goal was to get at the fundamental truths of the world. He had no place for dissemblers, liars, conmen, or frauds, and he made his feelings well-known. In Orwell on Truth, excerpts from across Orwell's career show how his writing and worldview developed over the decades, profoundly shaped by his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, and further by...