Spanish literature: the best books of 2020
Novels The 30 best international literature books of 2020
Essays: The 20 Best Nonfiction Books of 2020
International cinema: the films of the year
National cinema. 20 films of 2020
The year of the confinement and global pessimism has been conducive to
historical reflection
and bookstores have met that demand with an almost unapproachable catalog of books, from the informative chronicles of past plagues to global analyzes of millenary empires.
EL MUNDO journalists make their selection of the
best history books of 2020
, arranged alphabetically by the author's last name.
'The driver's son', by Jordi Amat
Tusquets
The story of Alfons Quintà (1943-2016), a rogue raised in Josep Pla's service, who went from waiter to blackmailer, from blackmailer to journalist and from journalist to agent of the Pujolista sewers and abuser of women, allows us to reconstruct the story recent history of Catalonia from an almost grotesque perspective.
'Black snow', by Jorge Benítez
KO books
A few months before the success of the
Queen's Gambit
series
,
Black Snow
used chess and the story of its geniuses as a way to explain the civilization of the board: the madness of Fischer, the excellence of the Soviet masters and the abyss of the perfect game. computers say a lot about the world we live in.
'An indomitable violence', by Julián Casanova
Review
Colonial violence, ethnic cleansing, genocide, the nuclear threat and sexual violence ... All the ills of the 19th century were pushed to the limit in the 20th century, in a loop that begins with the Sarajevo bombing and continues until the Balkan wars in the 1990s. Casanova spins and makes sense of that fury.
'The culture of conversation', by Benedetta Craveri
Siruela
After the expansionism of the seventeenth century, France entered a civilizational splendor represented by the literary salon, and its hostesses, always women.
As in his previous book,
The Libertines
, Craveri identifies a subculture of refinement and humanism in the decline of the Old Regime in Europe.
'The Europeans', by Orlando Figes
Taurus
The correspondence between a French theater director, a Russian literature teacher and a Spanish soprano, linked in a chivalrous love triangle, serve for Figes to portray the right moment in which the educated Europeans of the 19th century began to share readings, symphonies , modes, fashions and sensibilities.
'Arthur Conan Doyle, Private Investigator', by Margaride Fox
Tusquets
The invention of Sherlock Holmes was not a chance disconnected from its time: on the contrary, it expresses the mentality of the British Empire at its best on issues such as crime, race and the idea of the other.
Proof of that importance came to its creator, Conan Doyle, when a German Jew wrongly convicted of a crime asked for his help.
'Bilbao in Mauthausen', by Etxahun Galparsoro
Review
A teenager begins to work in the industries of Bilbao: he joins the CNT, encounters the war and leaves for the Battle of the Ebro. The journey does not end until Mauthausen.
75 years after his release, Galparsoro recovers the words of his great-uncle, Marcelino Bilbao, in a moving book of historical testimony.
'ETA and the heroin conspiracy', by Pablo García Varela
Akal
The intimidation, targeting and murder of drug dealers was a major public relations operation for ETA in the 1980s learned from the Black Panthers.
It was also the excuse to justify some ill-calculated crimes, to get rid of some disgraced gang members, and to add infamy to the damage of death.
'The Vampire.
A New Story 'by Nick Groom
Wake up Ferro
In the year of the pandemic, the myth of the vampire has been historically dismantled as a representation of the tension between East and West, the fear of progress, the opium fever, the sexual claustrophobia of the 19th century and obsessions. of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
All mixed and applied to the eternal myth of the bloodsucker.
Tom Holland.
'Dominion', by Tom Holland
Attic of the Books
Holland, known for his history of the Roman Republic, explains here Christianity as a historical and cultural phenomenon, rather than a transcendent one, and explains its ability to adapt to a modern world that appears to be secular but, in reality, yearns more than ever for comfort. of divinity.
'A Pirate Against Capital', by Steven Johnson
Turner
A fringe person in an anecdotal episode changed the history of modern economics.
The pirate Avery, an aspiring privateer who was disdained by the United Kingdom, struck a chord by sinking the ship of a Muslim prince.
Its success caused such alarm that it led to the
invention
of the public-private economy and, in its own way, of financial globalization.
'The Ghost Map', by Steven Johnson
Captain swing
An anesthetist and a conscientious reverend were the two great heroes in the fight against the plague that struck London with unprecedented violence in 1854. Their work, clinical and informative, set in motion the great hygienist revolution of the 19th century and the slow transformation of the new industrialized cities in relatively healthy places.
Henry Kamen.
'The Invention of Spain', by Henry Kamen
Espasa
El Cid, the Reconquest, the Empire ... Are they to blame for the fragility of the Spanish project?
The English Hispanist explains in his latest book why the erratic construction of Spanish national myths (equivalent to those of any other modern state) has been the source of so many problems in the Spain of our time.
'38 stars', by Josefina Licitra
Seix Barral
It was, perhaps, the first episode in the lead years of Latin America.
An apparently friendly and romantic first act: 38 prisoners, women who supported the Tupamaros, escaped from a prison in Montevideo.
The policeman who was chasing them was an impeccable gentleman, the state they were fighting was a democracy, and their fighting methods were innocuous.
Everything went crazy very soon.
'The last thirds', by Davide Maffi
Wake up Ferro
The reign of Carlos II has an infamous place in the history of Spain.
The reality, Maffi discovers, was not so bad.
His were years of good diplomacy, economic reforms and meritorious military draws against rivals like France, which were in their great moment of expansion.
Later, the Bourbons arrived and made him the scapegoat of history.
'And now, go back to your homes', by Evelyn Mesquida
Editions B
Some normal lives in workshops and factories in provincial cities hid heroic memories.
The history of the Spaniards who fought the French Resistance (narrated by Mesquida in
La Nueve
) has an epilogue in this book: the account of their often invisible years after heroism.
'Say Nothing' by Patrick Radden Keefe
Reservoir
The lead years of Northern Ireland are narrated from a wrong and unpunished crime: Jean McConville, a 38-year-old widow, mother of 10 children, was swallowed by the earth one day and none of her neighbors thought it bad.
A rumor had spread that he was collaborating with the British Army.
An immense legacy of oral history allows us to reconstruct a horrifying story.
'The Habsburgs;
sovereigns of the world ', by Martyn Rady
Taurus
Contrary to the image they wanted to convey to history and public opinion, the great family of European politics based its identity on mercantile pragmatism rather than on a mystical sense of its place in the world.
Trade, historical falsification, resistance ... those were the keys that allowed the success of the Habsburgs
Pierre Rosanvallon.
'The century of populism', by Pierre Rosanvallon
Gutenberg Galaxy
After the euphoria of May 68, Rosanvallon was one of the theorists of the so-called
deuxième gauche,
which recast the French political left with a critical perspective.
Now, this ideological nonconformity leads him to analyze the great brand of our time, the appearance of
democracies
with a guaranteeist aspect and sentimental essence.
'The Five Women', by Hallie Rubenhold
Rocaeditorial
The story of Jack the Ripper had a black hole: his victims, so many times dispatched as
lost ones
who paid for their mistakes in his terrible death.
The reality is that only one of them was a prostitute.
Discovering their stories reveals the sexuality, the economy and the situation of women in Victorian England.
'A tribute to the land', by Joe Sacco
Reservoir
A tribute to the land
is a report, a history book and a manifesto of denunciation, all at the same time and expressed in the form of a comic.
Sacco, who has already used this technique in his books on the Balkans and World War I, addresses here the marginalization of Indian communities in Canada and the exploitation of their lands.
'The world in suspense', by Daniel Schönpflug
Turner
Psychoanalysis, avant-garde music, rationalist architecture, avant-garde art ... The immense trauma of World War I stopped a moment of cultural plenitude in Europe.
After the war, the Europeans returned to their homes and resumed their debates, experiments and investigations.
Schönpflug explains how that resurrection was possible.
'M.
The son of the century ', Antonio Scurati
Alfaguara
Benito Mussolini's fictionalized life becomes a broad historical disclosure that explains the rise of fascism from a psychological and emotional perspective.
Fascism exists, among other things, because authoritarian temperaments like that of the Duce exist, Scurati comes to expose.
'If Venice dies', by Salvatore Settis
Turner
Venice is said to have been dying since 1806, when Napoleon's troops arrived in the city and ended its republic.
In reality, each step taken since then has led to tourist and economic success and the paradoxical death of a place that had 170,000 inhabitants in the 1940s and today only has 53,000.
Gypsy Holocaust, by María Sierra
Arzalia
The project to eradicate the gypsies of Europe during the years of the Third Reich was the culmination of many centuries of anti-Gypsyism ... Just like their current oblivion, when their extermination does not have an extended name, equivalent to "Shoa".
Sierra's book rebels against this ignorance, which mixes global analysis and human stories.
'The Visigoths.
Children of a furious god ', by José Soto Chica
Wake up Ferro
In a Spain haunted by its past, the Visigoths are the next historiographic boom and a black hole for many 2020 readers. Their journey took them from being Scandinavian nomads famous for their thoughtless violence to becoming sedentary and almost Romanized Spaniards. in an almost unusual process in the history of Europe.
'Franco in front of Hitler', by Luis E. Togores
The Sphere of Books
Why did the dictatorship survive its failed bid for the German Italian Axis?
Franco's secret and unpublished correspondence with Hitler, Mussolini, Roosevelt, the Pope and his brother-in-law Serrano Suñer allows us to discover how the regime reinvented itself, month after month, increasingly far from fascism to survive in a changing scenario.
'Infamy', by Jerry Toner
Wake up Ferro
We know about Rome and still study its Civil Law today;
Less well known is its Criminal Law, a discipline so lax that it allowed the Romans to behave "like real sons of bitches" among themselves.
Infamy
is a story of criminality in the Empire, from robbery to assassination.
'International Brigades', by Giles Tremlett
Debate
Up to 35,000 volunteers from 60 countries fought alongside the Second Republic in the Civil War, that contest that was also a laboratory that positioned the powers on the eve of World War II.
There were heroes, cowards and survivors who escaped as they could from the disaster.
Tremlett puts the tools of the journalistic chronicle and the historical synthesis.
An idea that can be reviewed: contrary to what is usually said, the brigadistas were good fighters, although they were not to the liking of Largo Caballero.
The Holy Roman Empire ', by Peter H. Wilson
Deperta Ferro
The Holy Roman Empire was born from a pact between Rome and Carlo Magno and survived a thousand years thanks to a flexible and subtle policy that functioned as an omen of the European Union.
In addition, it was a magnificent barrier against the Ottoman Empire.
Why, despite this, did it have this tendency to political self-destruction?
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