The Spanish Anarchists - The Heroic Years 1868-1936, by Murray Bookchin

From the rear side cover: A long-awaited new edition of this seminal history of Spanish Anarchism. Hailed as a masterpiece, it includes a new prefatory essay by the author. This popular, well-researched book opens with the Italian Anarchist Fanelli's stirring visit to Spain in 1868 and traces the movement's check­ered but steady growth for the next 70 years. Intimate portraits are vividly juxtaposed with striking descriptions of events: peasant revolts, labor unrest, the saintly Fermin Salvochea, official repression, the terrorists and the evolution of exciting organizational forms. Bookchin weaves his way geographically through the whole of Spain, revealing the shadings and subtleties of each small section. From the peasants of Andalusia to the factory workers of Barcelona, the Spanish people - and their exuberant belief in and struggles for freedom and self-determination - come alive.

As a young man, Murray Bookchin was deeply involved in support groups on behalf of the Spanish Revolution of 1936-39. A lifelong radical since the early 1930s, he was a trade-union activist in the 1930s and 1940s, an innovative theorist in the 1960s, and a leading participant in the antinuclear move­ment and the radical wing of the Greens in the 1970s and 1980s. Now in his seventies, Bookchin's writings have had a strong influence on left libertarians. The idealism of the Spanish Revolution is a memory that he continues to treasure more than a half-century after its tragic defeat.