Hotel Florida

January 20, 2014
During Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, American reporters Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn blustered around with a sometimes daring, often obnoxious self-confidence in their separate quests to get the latest scoops from the front. Vaill (Everybody Was So Young) combines their professional and personal stories with those of their European colleagues, partners Robert Capa and Gerda Taro, and the Madrid Foreign Press Office’s Arturo Barea and Ilsa Kulcsar. Mentioned only rarely, the formerly sumptuous Hotel Florida served as a Madrid base, allowing the courageous, ambitious journalists to interact with Barea and Kulcsar, who convinced their superiors to cease censoring the journalists’ reports. Vaill vividly recounts specific scenes of dying Spanish soldiers and citizens captured photographically by the journalists as well as deftly describing how Gellhorn insinuated herself into Hemingway’s marriage. Memorably, Capa and Taro’s heartbreaking relationship results in insightful photographs and top-notch reporting while Spanish native Barea and Austrian Kulcsar maintain their dignity even as they flee nearly penniless from Madrid, each suddenly without a country. Beautifully told, Vaill’s story captures the timeless immediacy of warfront reporting with the universal struggle to stay in love, just before the Nazis permanently changed the European landscape. 16p. b&w illus. Agent: Eric Simonoff, William Morris Endeavor.