Books: The Old Melodrama

MY MISSION TO SPAIN (437 pp.)—Claude G. Bowers—Simon & Schuster ($6).

The Spanish Civil War refuses to lie still in its political grave. It keeps haunting memories, arguments, books and loyalty files. For countless Americans now over 35, it was the first great meeting with history, the first passionate political love affair—or hate binge. Scores of keen-eyed witnesses, including Britain's late George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia (TIME, May 19, 1952), have shown that the war was not a simple melodrama of Franco vice v. Loyalist virtue, but a far more complex tragedy...