Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War, written by Amanda Vaill, published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2014.

The Hotel Florida, once a landmark located in Madrid, Spain, is the setting for Amanda Vaill's compelling retrospective history of the Spanish Civil War. Using the venue of the hotel during the years of 1936-39 as her foundation, she concentrates on the experiences of select occupants as a narrative device to vividly illustrate the horrendous turmoil of the Civil War. The key players are Ernest Hemingway and the journalist Martha Gellhorn; Robert Capa and his fellow photographer, Gerda Tao; and Arturo Barea, Chief of the Spanish Government's Press Office in Madrid, along with his deputy, Ilsa Kulcsar, an Austrian communist.

Not surprisingly, Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn emerge center stage among the occupants of the Hotel Florida. This is because both of them were intuitively conscious of the enormity of the story as well as the consequences. During their time together in Spain, Martha Gellhorn maintained a steady correspondence with Eleanor Roosevelt while Hemingway kept Maxwell Perkins at Scribner's alert to his progress on To Have and Have Not. Both were also engaged as journalists. Gellhorn was writing for Collier's magazine while Hemingway was under contract with the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA). Together they worked on the production of The Spanish Earth, a documentary filmed in Spain during the war under the direction of Joris Ivens, a Dutch communist.

The author's story design succeeds brilliantly as a pathway for the description of key battles and strategic developments between the Loyalists and the Nationalists and the devastating consequences for the Spanish people caught in the middle. The narrative is credible, objective, and vastly illuminating. All in all, Hotel Florida is one of the best books ever written about the Spanish Civil War.