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'For us it was Heaven': The Passion, Grief and Fortitude of Patience Darton: From the Spanish Civil War to Mao's China By Angela Jackson (Brighton, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 2012) (264 pages; $22.00 Kindle e-book, $74.95 hardcover, $34.95 paper)
'For us it was Heaven' is the first of a trio of books concerned with the International Brigades (IBs) and republican medical services in the Spanish Civil War, sponsored in 2012 by the Cañada Blanch Centre for Contemporary Spanish Studies. Angela Jackson's well-orchestrated and original biography fits within the new scholarship, partly the result of new archival discoveries and partly because of the passing of the generation that lived through and fought the war, that has effectively shifted the historical narrative closer to its original, pre-Cold War position. Viewing the Spanish Civil War as a fight between an elected democracy and a fascist-military rebellion rather than a war between fascism and communism, Jackson also treats the IB volunteers as heroic antifascists rather than dupes of Stalin.
As both a historian and novelist, Jackson brings a unique perspective to her evocative biography of left-wing nurse Patience Darton, from the Spanish Civil War to Mao's China. Jackson is the author of two scholarly works: British Women and the Spanish Civil War (2002) and Beyond the Battlefield: Testimony, Memory and Remembrance of a Cave...