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Alvah Bessie's Spanish Civil War Notebooks. Edited by Dan Bessie. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002. ISBN 0-8131-2214-7. Photographs. Illustrations. Notes. Index. Pp. ix, 156. $22,00,
Alvah Bessie (1904-1985) was a stage manager and Paris reporter before enlisting in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion in 1938. Ile fought in the Spanish Civil War "to achieve self-integration"(p. 54)-by developing self-- discipline and unselfishness-and to fight fascism. After the war, Bessie wrote Men in Battle and became a Hollywood screenwriter until 1947, when he was imprisoned for refusing to cooperate with the house Committee on Un-American Activities. Bessie next wrote novels, worked for a union newspaper, and penned film and book reviews. His son Dan is a film director and...