“Peter Carroll has written with great skill and understanding the fifty-year story of the Americans who fought in the Spanish civil war. Never has the complicated and intriguing tale been told so fully, drawing as it does not only from survivors who can recount their experiences, but also from a wealth of original material, including the just-opened archives in Moscow. What is particularly fascinating is the account of the tribulations and triumphs of the veterans in the years after they were ‘premature anti-fascists.’ This is the moment for this book to appear, and one is grateful that it has been done so well.”—Peter Stansky, Stanford University
“This rare, this astonishing book—rich, authoritative, and moving as it is on its central subject—through Peter Carroll’s way of chronicling becomes something even greater: an urgently contemporary touchstone that helps us discern in our time similar contending forces in moral, not political terms—good against evil, might against right, means against ends. In a vivid, pulsing narrative, Carroll encompasses the historical context, the drama of men in battle, and most of all the haunting human beings themselves. But what can be found nowhere else is his account of the succeeding fifty years of those who survived, as they stubbornly clung to their beliefs in the necessity of action and the possibility of transformative social change.”—Tillie Olsen