Birth and death rituals in different places fascinating.
"The routine of death in Madrid [is a] well-trodden path. The dead are carted off to the the city's official morgue. ....Beautified by morticians, they are laid out... and put on public display so friends and family can make a final, posthumous visit ...with vigils going on for up to twenty-six dead, all neatly arranged in adjoining cubicles, the sanatorio bustles like a railway terminus.
The Civil War was also a bloodbath that pitted brother against brother and neighbour against neighbour. By the time the guns had stopped smoking and Franco had signed his final parte de guerra on 1 April 1939, some half a million Spaniards were dead. There are no exact figures, but it is thought that some 200,000 were executed by the two sides....
One in thirty Spanish men were dead.
pickWe didn‘t study any Spanish history when I did my degree and I wanted to find out more about Franco‘s regime. Actually, there was only a chapter or two about that in this book, although many other aspects covered do link back to the Spanish ‘pact of forgetting‘.
In the end, the more political chapters were the least interesting; the sociological ones were fascinating, covering the Costas, flamenco, corruption, brothels, birth and death, et al.
pickAlthough restricted by Tremlett's perspective, this book offers some insights into the idiosyncrasies of the Spanish part of my family and some of the rather surprising things I saw while visiting Spain a few years ago. It also offers a potentially cautionary parallel between Spain's identity crisis and that in the US, including a shared distrust of government and the media and a tendency to believe whatever we feel like regardless of facts. ⬇️
Third Spain-themed non-fiction book in a row. Because obviously the time to realise I know precisely nothing about modern Spanish history is a mere two weeks before I start my MLang in Spanish and Linguistics...
Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through Spain and Its Silent Past | 
