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Moment of War: A Memoir of the Spanish Civil War | 
 enlarge | Author: Laurie Lee
Publisher: New Press
Category: Book
Buy Used: £9.43
Used (10) from £9.43
Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 807641
Media: Paperback
Edition: Reprint
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.2 x 0.4
ISBN: 1565841735
Dewey Decimal Number: 920
EAN: 9781565841734
ASIN: 1565841735
Publication Date: May 1994
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
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| Customer Reviews:
 I was left as disillusioned as the author. October 5, 1997
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Down in Stroud we have few famous people to cheer about and most of those are invisible (Princess Anne) or vulgar comers-in, so Laurie Lee always had great celebrity in the whole area. His 'Cider with Rosie' is legendary, while 'As I walked out one Midsummer's Morning' maintains the arcadian magic. Indeed, I thought much of him on my own teenage jaunts round Europe. As louts we would meet him up the Woolpack in Slad and occasionally throw pebbles into his beer. We followed his politics, too. Class differences in the country are even starker than in town. This title was one I had awaited for a long time. I had read Orwell's 'Homage to Catalonia' and expected something as inspiring, but this is definitely the work of an older man, looking back with indulgence and sorrow at his youth. There is no heroism, indeed there is no ideology, and instead we have a sad book, without the charm of 'As I walked out..' or the commitment of 'Homage..' This particular crusader lost his way long before the war was over.. I lost interest in the book long before the end.
 Spare, vivid, unsentimental memoir of Spanish Civil War July 2, 1997
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Laurie Lee's spare, unsentimental memoir of his experience as a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War should take a place, I think, with Orwell's Homage to Catalonia as one of the English language classics of the time. Moved by idealistic sympathy for the Republican cause, Lee begins with his winter's journey by foot across the Pyrenees only to be taken as facist infiltrator and thrown into an underground pit-prison with a soon to executed deserter. Eventually allowed to join the International Brigade, he continues to tell a story of disillusionment: "I imagined a shoulder-to-shoulder brotherhood, a brave camaraderie joined in one purpose, not the fragmentation of national groups scattered around the courtyard talking wanly only to each other. Indeed they seemed to share a mutual air of unease and watchfulness, of distrust and even dislike." Yet A Moment of War is not sour story. Its prose evokes awareness heightened by danger and deprivation. Of a humble bowl of bean soup Lee writes, "Bean soup hot and chunky, with an interesting admixture of tar, but to me a gluttonous reward after almost two weeks of near famine in the cave. I remembered again the concentration of the senses, of smell and flavor, that hunger brings to appetite, and with each steaming spoonful I was also aware of the grime of the unscrubbed table, the rusting metal of the soup plate, the sharp frozen landscape outside, almost the fatness of each bean." Of a chance reencounter with a Spanish girl who smells of "fresh mushrooms and tampled thyme, woodsmoke and burning orange," he recalls the heady, sensual magic of being young, the "rare and magnetic driving patterns of youth, cutting across the humdrum chaos of the multitudes." The real story, however, is one of war told from a soldier's viewpoint, long delays and boredom interspersed with seemingly random episodes of violence, as vivid as any soldier's tale ever written. A Moment of War was a refreshing discovery for this media-burdened, hype-wearied reader. I am now searching for more of Laurie Lee's not well enough known titles.
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