
Hotel Florida
Truth, Love and Death in the Spanish Civil War
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
$0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Buy for $39.95
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Christopher Kipiniak
-
By:
-
Amanda Vaill
About this listen
A spellbinding story of love amid the devastation of the Spanish Civil War.
Madrid, 1936. In a city blasted by a civil war that many fear will cross borders and engulf Europe - a conflict one writer will call "the decisive thing of the century" - six people meet and find their lives changed forever. Ernest Hemingway, his career stalled, his marriage sour, hopes that this war will give him fresh material and new romance; Martha Gellhorn, an ambitious novice journalist hungry for love and experience, thinks she will find both with Hemingway in Spain. Robert Capa and Gerda Taro, idealistic young photographers based in Paris, want to capture history in the making and are inventing modern photojournalism in the process. And Arturo Barea, chief of Madrid's loyalist foreign press office, and Ilsa Kulcsar, his Austrian deputy, are struggling to balance truth-telling with loyalty to their sometimes compromised cause - a struggle that places both of them in peril.
Hotel Florida traces the tangled wartime destinies of these three couples against the backdrop of a critical moment in history. As Hemingway put it, "You could learn as much at the Hotel Florida in those years as you could anywhere in the world."
From the raw material of unpublished letters and diaries, official documents, and recovered reels of film, Amanda Vaill has created a narrative of love and reinvention that is, finally, a story about truth: finding it out, telling it, and living it - whatever the cost.
©2014 Amanda Vaill (P)2014 Audible Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
-
The Enlightenment
- The Pursuit of Happiness, 1680-1790
- By: Ritchie Robertson
- Narrated by: Jonathan Keeble
- Length: 40 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This magisterial history - sure to become the definitive work on the subject - recasts the Enlightenment as a period not solely consumed with rationale and reason, but rather as a pursuit of practical means to achieve greater human happiness.
-
-
The quickest 40 hour audio book I’ve listen to
- By Joey Caster on 04-02-21
-
Flirting with Danger
- The Mysterious Life of Marguerite Harrison, Socialite Spy
- By: Janet Wallach
- Narrated by: Saskia Maarleveld
- Length: 9 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Born a privileged child of America’s Gilded Age, Marguerite Harrison rebelled against her mother’s ambitions, married the man she loved, was widowed at thirty-seven, and set off on a life of adventure. Hired as a society reporter, when America entered World War I she applied to Military Intelligence to work as a spy. Over a decade, Harrison’s mysterious adventures took her to Europe, Baghdad, and the Far East, as a socialite, secret agent, and documentary filmmaker. Janet Wallach captures Harrison’s daring and glamour in this stranger-than-fiction history of a woman drawn to the impossible.
-
-
The rich descriptions of the characters brought them to life.
- By askmurphy on 07-10-24
By: Janet Wallach
-
Your Table Is Ready
- Tales of a New York City Maître D'
- By: Michael Cecchi-Azzolina
- Narrated by: Michael Cecchi-Azzolina
- Length: 9 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From the glamorous to the entitled, from royalty to the financially ruined, everyone who wanted to be seen—or just to gawk—at the hottest restaurants in New York City came to places Michael Cecchi-Azzolina helped run. His phone number was passed around among those who wanted to curry favor, during the decades when restaurants replaced clubs and theater as, well, theater in the most visible, vibrant city in the world. Besides dropping us back into a vanished time, Your Table Is Ready takes us places we’d never be able to get into on our own.
-
-
Accurately crass and heart felt
- By Amazon Customer on 01-10-23
-
The Correspondents
- Six Women Writers on the Front Lines of World War II
- By: Judith Mackrell
- Narrated by: Julie Teal
- Length: 17 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
On the front lines of the Second World War, a contingent of female journalists were bravely waging their own battle. Barred from combat zones and faced with entrenched prejudice and bureaucratic restrictions, these women were forced to fight for the right to work on equal terms with men.
-
-
Narration was nails on a chalkboard
- By aunt deb on 12-20-21
By: Judith Mackrell
-
Facing the Mountain
- A True Story of Japanese American Heroes in World War II
- By: Daniel James Brown
- Narrated by: Louis Ozawa
- Length: 17 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the days and months after Pearl Harbor, the lives of Japanese Americans across the continent and Hawaii were changed forever. In this unforgettable chronicle of war-time America and the battlefields of Europe, Daniel James Brown portrays the journey of Rudy Tokiwa, Fred Shiosaki, and Kats Miho, who volunteered for the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and were deployed to France, Germany, and Italy, where they were asked to do the near impossible. Brown also tells the story of these soldiers' parents, immigrants who were forced to submit to life in concentration camps on U.S. soil.
-
-
Wow
- By Tbone McCoy on 06-13-21
-
Dutch Girl
- Audrey Hepburn and World War II
- By: Robert Matzen, Luca Dotti - foreword
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 10 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Twenty-five years after her passing, Audrey Hepburn remains the most beloved of all Hollywood stars, known as much for her role as UNICEF ambassador as for films like Roman Holiday and Breakfast at Tiffany's. Several biographies have chronicled her stardom, but none has covered her intense experiences through five years of Nazi occupation in the Netherlands. According to her son, Luca Dotti, "The war made my mother who she was."
-
-
Good story, poor narration
- By sas on 07-09-19
By: Robert Matzen, and others
-
The Enlightenment
- The Pursuit of Happiness, 1680-1790
- By: Ritchie Robertson
- Narrated by: Jonathan Keeble
- Length: 40 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This magisterial history - sure to become the definitive work on the subject - recasts the Enlightenment as a period not solely consumed with rationale and reason, but rather as a pursuit of practical means to achieve greater human happiness.
-
-
The quickest 40 hour audio book I’ve listen to
- By Joey Caster on 04-02-21
-
Flirting with Danger
- The Mysterious Life of Marguerite Harrison, Socialite Spy
- By: Janet Wallach
- Narrated by: Saskia Maarleveld
- Length: 9 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Born a privileged child of America’s Gilded Age, Marguerite Harrison rebelled against her mother’s ambitions, married the man she loved, was widowed at thirty-seven, and set off on a life of adventure. Hired as a society reporter, when America entered World War I she applied to Military Intelligence to work as a spy. Over a decade, Harrison’s mysterious adventures took her to Europe, Baghdad, and the Far East, as a socialite, secret agent, and documentary filmmaker. Janet Wallach captures Harrison’s daring and glamour in this stranger-than-fiction history of a woman drawn to the impossible.
-
-
The rich descriptions of the characters brought them to life.
- By askmurphy on 07-10-24
By: Janet Wallach
-
Your Table Is Ready
- Tales of a New York City Maître D'
- By: Michael Cecchi-Azzolina
- Narrated by: Michael Cecchi-Azzolina
- Length: 9 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From the glamorous to the entitled, from royalty to the financially ruined, everyone who wanted to be seen—or just to gawk—at the hottest restaurants in New York City came to places Michael Cecchi-Azzolina helped run. His phone number was passed around among those who wanted to curry favor, during the decades when restaurants replaced clubs and theater as, well, theater in the most visible, vibrant city in the world. Besides dropping us back into a vanished time, Your Table Is Ready takes us places we’d never be able to get into on our own.
-
-
Accurately crass and heart felt
- By Amazon Customer on 01-10-23
-
The Correspondents
- Six Women Writers on the Front Lines of World War II
- By: Judith Mackrell
- Narrated by: Julie Teal
- Length: 17 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
On the front lines of the Second World War, a contingent of female journalists were bravely waging their own battle. Barred from combat zones and faced with entrenched prejudice and bureaucratic restrictions, these women were forced to fight for the right to work on equal terms with men.
-
-
Narration was nails on a chalkboard
- By aunt deb on 12-20-21
By: Judith Mackrell
-
Facing the Mountain
- A True Story of Japanese American Heroes in World War II
- By: Daniel James Brown
- Narrated by: Louis Ozawa
- Length: 17 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the days and months after Pearl Harbor, the lives of Japanese Americans across the continent and Hawaii were changed forever. In this unforgettable chronicle of war-time America and the battlefields of Europe, Daniel James Brown portrays the journey of Rudy Tokiwa, Fred Shiosaki, and Kats Miho, who volunteered for the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and were deployed to France, Germany, and Italy, where they were asked to do the near impossible. Brown also tells the story of these soldiers' parents, immigrants who were forced to submit to life in concentration camps on U.S. soil.
-
-
Wow
- By Tbone McCoy on 06-13-21
-
Dutch Girl
- Audrey Hepburn and World War II
- By: Robert Matzen, Luca Dotti - foreword
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 10 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Twenty-five years after her passing, Audrey Hepburn remains the most beloved of all Hollywood stars, known as much for her role as UNICEF ambassador as for films like Roman Holiday and Breakfast at Tiffany's. Several biographies have chronicled her stardom, but none has covered her intense experiences through five years of Nazi occupation in the Netherlands. According to her son, Luca Dotti, "The war made my mother who she was."
-
-
Good story, poor narration
- By sas on 07-09-19
By: Robert Matzen, and others
-
Agent Sonya
- Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy
- By: Ben Macintyre
- Narrated by: Ben Macintyre
- Length: 14 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1942, in a quiet village in the leafy English Cotswolds, a thin, elegant woman lived in a small cottage with her three children and her husband, who worked as a machinist nearby. Ursula Burton was friendly but reserved, and spoke English with a slight foreign accent. By all accounts, she seemed to be living a simple, unassuming life. Her neighbors in the village knew little about her. They didn’t know that she was a high-ranking Soviet intelligence officer. They didn’t know that her husband was also a spy, or that she was running powerful agents across Europe.
-
-
Wanted to love it
- By Robert Bell on 09-30-20
By: Ben Macintyre
-
Berlin Diary
- The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934–1941
- By: William L. Shirer
- Narrated by: Tom Weiner
- Length: 15 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
By the acclaimed journalist and New York Times best-selling author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, this day-by-day eyewitness account of the momentous events leading up to World War II in Europe is the private, personal, utterly revealing journal of a great foreign correspondent.
-
-
The Real Rise and Fall
- By Robert on 02-26-14
-
Homage to Catalonia
- By: George Orwell
- Narrated by: Frederick Davidson
- Length: 8 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1936, George Orwell went to Spain to report on the civil war and instead joined the P.O.U.M. militia to fight against the Fascists. In this now justly famous account of his experience, he describes both the bleak and the comic aspects of trench warfare on the Aragon front, the Barcelona uprising in May 1937, his nearly fatal wounding just two weeks later, and his escape from Barcelona into France after the P.O.U.M. was suppressed.
-
-
Excellent book, marred by narration
- By Kirby on 02-02-13
By: George Orwell
-
A Guest of the Reich
- The Story of American Heiress Gertrude Legendre's Dramatic Captivity and Escape from Nazi Germany
- By: Peter Finn
- Narrated by: Rebecca Lowman
- Length: 7 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Gertrude "Gertie" Legendre was a big-game hunter from a wealthy industrial family who lived a charmed life in Jazz Age America. Her adventurous spirit made her the inspiration for the Broadway play Holiday, which became a film starring Katharine Hepburn. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Legendre, by then married and a mother of two, joined the OSS, the wartime spy organization that preceded the CIA.
-
-
Fascinating woman in a horrible period in history
- By Marlette on 12-03-19
By: Peter Finn
-
The Women Who Wrote the War
- The Riveting Saga of World War II's Daredevil Women Correspondents
- By: Nancy Caldwell Sorel
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 14 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Nancy Sorel’s portrait pays homage to these unsung heroes. They came from Boston, New York, Milwaukee, and St. Louis; from Yakima, Washington; Austin, Texas; and Sioux City, Iowa; from San Francisco and all points east. They left comfortable homes and safe surroundings for combat-zone duty. As women war correspondents, they brought to the battlefields of World War II a fresh optic, and reported back home what they witnessed with a new sensibility.
-
-
Nonfiction Account of WW2 Female News Reporters
- By DHackney on 08-30-13
-
Spain in Our Hearts
- Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939
- By: Adam Hochschild
- Narrated by: Henry Strozier
- Length: 15 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
For three crucial years in the 1930s, the Spanish Civil War dominated headlines in America and around the world as volunteers flooded to Spain to help its democratic government fight off a fascist uprising led by Francisco Franco and aided by Hitler and Mussolini. Today we're accustomed to remembering the war through Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls and Robert Capa's photographs. But Adam Hochschild has discovered some less familiar yet far more compelling characters who reveal the full tragedy and importance of the war.
-
-
Great book very well written and narrated
- By James750 on 05-12-16
By: Adam Hochschild
-
You Don't Belong Here
- How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War
- By: Elizabeth Becker
- Narrated by: Lisa Flanagan
- Length: 9 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Kate Webb, an Australian iconoclast, Catherine Leroy, a French daredevil photographer, and Frances FitzGerald, a blue-blood American intellectual, arrived in Vietnam with starkly different life experiences but one shared purpose: to report on the most consequential story of the decade. At a time when women were considered unfit to be foreign reporters, Frankie, Catherine, and Kate challenged the rules imposed on them by the military, ignored the belittlement of their male peers, and ultimately altered the craft of war reportage for generations.
-
-
Good book for Vietnam buffs
- By Penelopatty on 03-27-21
By: Elizabeth Becker
-
The Good Assassin
- How a Mossad Agent and a Band of Survivors Hunted Down the Butcher of Latvia
- By: Stephan Talty
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 9 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The untold story of an Israeli spy’s epic journey to bring the notorious Butcher of Latvia to justice - a case that altered the fates of all ex-Nazis.
-
-
Wonderful: A complete history wrapped in a story
- By Aaron on 04-22-20
By: Stephan Talty
-
Slightly Out of Focus
- By: Robert Capa
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 5 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this book, Capa recounts his terrifying journey through the darkest battles of World War II and shares his memories of the men and women of the Allied forces who befriended, amused, and captivated him along the way. His photographs are masterpieces - John G. Morris, Magnum Photos' first executive editor, called Capa "the century's greatest battlefield photographer" - and his writing is by turns riotously funny and deeply moving.
-
-
Perfectly Named
- By J.Brock on 08-24-21
By: Robert Capa
-
The Art of Resistance
- My Four Years in the French Underground: A Memoir
- By: Justus Rosenberg
- Narrated by: Rob Shapiro
- Length: 7 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1937, as the Nazis gained control and anti-Semitism spread in the Free City of Danzig, a majority German city on the Baltic Sea, 16-year-old Justus Rosenberg was sent to Paris to finish his education in safety. Three years later, France fell to the Germans. Alone and in danger, penniless and cut off from contact with his family in Poland, Justus fled south.
-
-
Rosenberg, Please focus
- By Jess on 03-20-22
By: Justus Rosenberg
-
Crucible
- The Long End of the Great War and the Birth of a New World, 1917-1924
- By: Charles Emmerson
- Narrated by: Charles Emmerson
- Length: 25 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Petrograd, a fire is lit. The Tsar is packed off to Siberia. A rancorous Russian exile returns to proclaim a workers' revolution. In America, black soldiers who have served their country in Europe demand their rights at home. An Austrian war veteran trained by the German army to give rousing speeches against the Bolshevik peril begins to rail against the Jews. A solar eclipse turns a former patent clerk into a celebrity. An American reporter living the high life in Paris searches out a new literary style.
-
-
Splendid in all respects
- By Paul Custer on 02-11-20
By: Charles Emmerson
-
No Ordinary Assignment
- A Memoir
- By: Jane Ferguson
- Narrated by: Jane Ferguson
- Length: 10 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Jane Ferguson has covered nearly every war front and humanitarian crisis of our time. She reported from Yemen as protests grew into the Arab Spring; she secured rare access to rebel-held Syria, where foreign journalists were banned, to cover its civil war. When the Taliban claimed Kabul in 2021, she was one of the last Western journalists to remain at the airport as thousands of Afghans, including some of her colleagues, struggled to evacuate.
-
-
Answers the question beautifully
- By AREE on 07-19-23
By: Jane Ferguson