Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War

Amanda Vaill

Aug 2023 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Timothy Andrés Pabon

About this audiobook

"A vivid, well-paced story of the awfulness of war and of the complex motives of those who report on it." -The Wall Street Journal "Romantic . . . kaleidoscopic . . . adds to the cold hard facts-as well as the enduring mystique-of the Spanish Civil War." -Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air Madrid, 1936. In a city blasted by civil war, six people meet and find their lives changed forever. Ernest Hemingway, his career stalled, his marriage sour, hopes this war will give him fresh material and new romance; Martha Gellhorn, an ambitious novice journalist hungry for love and experience, thinks she will find both with Hemingway in Spain. Robert Capa and Gerda Taro, idealistic young photographers based in Paris, are inventing modern photojournalism as they capture history in the making. And Arturo Barea, Madrid's foreign press chief, and Ilsa Kulcsar, his Austrian deputy, are struggling to balance truth-telling with loyalty to their sometimes compromised cause-a struggle that places both of them in peril. Hotel Florida traces the tangled wartime destinies of these three couples against the backdrop of a critical moment in history. From the raw material of unpublished letters and diaries, official documents, and recovered reels of film, Amanda Vaill has created a narrative of love and reinvention that is, finally, a story about truth: finding it out, telling it, and living it-whatever the cost.

About the author

Amanda Vaill is the author of Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War, the bestselling Everybody Was So Young, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in biography, and Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins, for which she was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship.

Timothy Andres Pabon is an actor and Spanish and English voice-over artist/audiobook narrator from Washington DC. He has recorded over 140 books, one of which was nominated for a 2015 Society of Voice Arts and Sciences Award and another which received an AudioFile Earphones Award as part of an ensemble cast in 2014.