Laurie Lee

A Moment of War Laurie Lee

One of The New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of the Year

In December 1937, young Laurie Lee crossed the Pyrenees into Spain as a wartime volunteer from England, and in so doing walked straight into a loyalist prison and the bitter conflict of the Spanish Civil War. In this gripping memoir, he returns to the scene of his wartime coming of age and portrays the death of a young man s idealism with sincerity and a total lack of pretense.

This is the third volume in Laurie Lee s trilogy of his youth, which began with Cider With Rosie (which has sold more than six million copies worldwide) and continued with As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning.

For anyone who wants to understand what war is actually like, when it is not being dramatized, hyped, heroized, or propagandized, this is the book. For those who still cherish the beauty and the flexibility of the English language this book . . . [is] a treasure. Los Angeles Times Book Review

This enormously sophisticated work, a testament to the morality and weakness of humanity, has the plainness of Orwell but the metaphorical soaring of a poem . . . An extraordinary book. New York Times Book Review

One of the great classics of young-men-at-war in the English language. Because of Lee s extraordinary spare, concrete poetry, his precision in truthfully rendering what he saw, and his psychological understanding of it, this small gem of a book is one of the greatest gifts to readers I ve seen in years. Barbara Probst Solomon