Preface; Juan Negrín as a Human Being; His Career as a Scientist; His roles as Minister of Finance; Negrín & the Case of Andreu Nin; Governing without Tantrums; From Near Triumph to Near Catastrophe; The Relationship Between Negrín & Prieto; The Policy of Resistance; Unresolvable Conflicts of Mission; The Emotional Impasse of August, 1938; D Juan Negrín & His Kitchen Cabinet; Retreat, & Unaccepted Defeat; After the Civil War; Notes; Bibliography; Index.
Gabriel Jackson has published scholarly books and articles about modern Spain, medieval Spain, and twentieth-century Europe; also a short biography of Mozart, and three novels treating social and political problems. From 1983 to the present he has written opinion articles regularly for the Spanish newspaper EL PAIS, and book reviews for EL PAIS and for La Revista de Libros.
"This bleak reality provides the context for Jackson's portrayal of
Negr�n. For Negr�n, like the second Spanish Republic, there was no
happy ending. Continuing squabbles with Prieto over Republican
money ensured that Negr�n was effectively sidelined after 1945, and
he died of a heart attack in 1956. In this new biography Jackson
argues that Negr�n was treated unfairly. Some may disagree but, at
the very least, Jackson's study clearly shows that Negr�n's role in
the final year of the doomed Spanish Republic has been worthy of
reappraisal." --Richard Baxell, author, British Volunteers in the
Spanish Civil War
"One of Gabriel Jackson's major achievements in this engrossing
biography is to move beyond the mountains of stereotype, slander
and half-truths, and to use all the available evidence to paint the
portrait of complex man facing extremely complex circumstances; a
fundamentally honest and decent human being who sacrificed his
health, reputation, and academic career in a failed attempt to save
his country from disaster. Jackson's book covers the whole of
Negr�n's life, with the bulk of the chapters dedicated to the years
1937-39. As a biographer, Jackson brings to the table not only
years of painstaking research - including new archival materials
and dozens of interviews with Negr�n's friends, family members,
colleagues and their children, conducted over a forty-year time
span - but also a significant dose of human understanding and
intuition, mediated through his knowledge of Spanish history as
much as his own life experience as non-Communist social democrat
barely thirty years younger than his subject. (For a political
biography, Juan Negr�n is in fact a remarkably personal book.)
Indeed, Jackson is forced to engage in a fair amount of
speculation, given the limited evidence available: in contrast to
many of his colleagues, Negr�n, an extremely reserved man, kept no
diary and his extant correspondence is too scant and impersonal to
give much insight into his emotional, sentimental, and
philosophical state of mind. The result is an eminently readable,
refreshingly straightforward account of an accomplished scientist
and cosmopolitan intellectual who in normal circumstances would
have never had to become a politician, let alone take his country's
reins during the most difficult years of its long history.
Jackson's Negr�n is a welcome addition to other recent reappraisals
of the Prime Minister's life and career." --Bulletin for Spanish
and Portuguese Historical Studies
"Jackson's nicely written volume, interspersed with personal
anecdotes, including his own experiences as a fellow traveller in
the 1930s and his encounters with exiled Republican leaders, makes
for compelling reading." --Bulletin of Spanish Studies
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