From: cansv-AT-igc.org
Date: Tue, 12 Nov 2002 22:51:11 -0800
Subject: AUT: NEW SEIDMAN BOOK 


This is from the publisher's blurb

REPUBLIC OF EGOS
(University of Wisconsin Press ISBN: 02992788641 $24.95)

Most histories of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) have examined major leaders or 
well-established political and social groups to explore class, gender, and ideological 
struggles. The  war in Spain was marked by momentous conflicts between democracy 
and dictatorship,  Communism and fascism, anarchism and authoritarianism, and 
Catholicism and anticlericalism that  still provoke our fascination. 

                     In Republic of Egos, Michael Seidman focuses instead on the personal and 
individual experiences  of the common men and women who were actors in a struggle 
that defined a generation and helped  to shape our world. By examining the roles of 
anonymous individuals, families, and small groups who fought for their own interests 
and survival-and not necessarily for an abstract or revolutionary cause-Seidman 
reveals a powerful but rarely considered pressure on the outcome of history. He           
shows how price controls and inflation in the Republican zone encouraged peasant 
hoarding, black marketing, and unrest among urban workers. Soldiers of the Republican 
Army responded to material shortages by looting, deserting, and fraternizing with the 
enemy. Seidman's focus on average, seemingly nonpolitical individuals provides a new 
vision of both the experience and outcome of the war. 

                     "Seidman combines a most impressive command of the existing literature 
on the Spanish Civil War with a highly original emphasis on the ways in which hunger, 
fear, sex, quality of leadership, quality of supplies (or lack thereof), isolation from 
friends and family, prospects of victory or defeat, and the struggle for sheer survival 
affected the morale and the behavior of millions of anonymous  participants. At the 
same time he makes many illuminating analogies with the English and American
civil wars and with the revolutionary experiences of France and Russia."-Gabriel 
Jackson, author of  The Spanish Republic and the Civil War 

                     About the Author
                     Michael Seidman is professor of history at the University of North Carolina-
Wilmington and author  of Workers against Work: Labor in Paris and Barcelona during 
the Popular Fronts. 


                     



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