GUERRA OLVIDADA EN LAS SIERRAS

HACE MAS DE 60 AÑOS una guerra azotó varias regiones de España. Era una guerra de que el público no fue informado, ni dentro del país ni afuera.

Cada día hay menos gente que vivío en su propria carne la lucha por grupos de guerrilleros contra el regimen de Franco. Uno por uno, los testigos se van desapareciendo.

El libro “Historia de los maquis – Entre dos fuegos“ deja constancia del impacto terrible de aquella guerra desconocida en las sierras de Málaga y Granada en los años 40. Recoge el testimonio — apasionante, espeluznante y emocionante — de los campesinos de la Axarquía. Y también de los guerrilleros y de la Guardia Civil.

Guerrilla war in Spain – new edition

MAROMA PRESS IS PLEASED to announce publication of a new edition of Between Two Fires — Guerrilla war in the Spanish sierras.  

Praised by historians and readers around the world, this book by David Baird is a poignant account how a Spanish village was trapped in a brutal guerrilla conflict — a conflict that was virtually unreported because of the strict censorship of the Franco regime.

Paul Preston, respected author of The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939 and many other books on recent Spanish history, says: “This superbly written book could not be  more timely.”

FINDING THE SIMPLE LIFE IN RURAL SPAIN

SOMETIMES, says David Baird, he dreams about garbanzos.

“Yes, chick-peas, those little bullet-like beans which have to be soaked for days and boiled for hours so that finally you can add some flavouring and create a fine stew — fine that is if you like bullet-like beans.”

He claims that’s what he lived on most of the time when he and his wife first settled in a Spanish village. He describes his efforts to live “the simple life” in Sunny Side Up — The 21st century hits a Spanish village.

Hilarious, nostalgic and moving, his book inspired the Sunday Times of London to comment: “Recommended reading for anybody who ever wondered what happened to the ‘real Spain’.”

Anther angle on that ‘real Spain’ is contained in Between Two Fires, Baird’s book about the guerrilla war that raged in the 1940s.

Gaddafi – Crazy as a Fox

So the Teacher-Leader, inspirer of the Green Revolution — revered by his followers but feared and hated by many others — has gone.

Muammar al-Gaddafi was judged by a fellow Arab leader to have “a split personality, both evil”. He may indeed have been crazy, but it was the craziness of a desert fox.

Years back I encountered the Teacher-Leader when reporting on a conference of African leaders in Libya (records David Baird). The media scene was reminiscent of that in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop and some of the leaders present could have qualified for bit parts in The Godfather.

Not the sort of people you would want to meet in a dark alley nor for that matter on a well-illuminated highway. And they were running countries!

But they had been feted in London and other capitals. Politicians had warmly shaken their bloodstained hands, eager to share in their mineral wealth or to conclude profitable trade deals.

THE SPAIN HEMINGWAY NEVER SAW

Ever meet a blind beggar who rides a motor-bike, a woman cured of disease by visions of the Virgin, a medic whose injections are to die for, a phantom who terrorised a village?

They’re all there, along with a host of other colourful characters in David Baird’s book, Sunny Side Up – The 21st century hits a Spanish village, just relaunched under the Maroma Press imprint.

Expat reminiscences about life in Spain are two-a-penny, but this book stands out for one special reason. It gets under the skin of a rural Málaga community as it shifts from a medieval life style into the computer age.

“Baird’s ironic glance back over the past 30 years is recommended reading for anybody who has ever wondered what happened to ‘the real Spain’,” according to the Sunday Times.

TITLE IT RIGHT — HOW TO GRAB READERS

Sooner or later every writer is faced by the same problem. What title to give his latest opus? Choosing the right words can be critical. The title has to grab the browsers’ attention, persuade them to scan a few pages, even put their cash down and buy the tome.

Pick the wrong title — not difficult — and they pass by on the other side. A tricky business, as I realised when I finally typed “The End” on a work that I had been toiling over for months. For the life of me I could not come up with a neat, catchy title, writes David Baird.

Murdoch’s Setback in the Outback — Media Tycoon With Problems

Suddenly his global media empire is trembling. Scandals are rocking Rupert Murdoch’s mighty corporation, News Corporation, owner of everything from Fox News to the Wall Street Journal and The Times of London.

Revelations of sordid phone-hacking have forced the Australian tycoon to close the world’s biggest-selling English-language newspaper, the News of the World.

But the Dirty Digger, as he has been dubbed, has a way of bouncing back. He graduated in the rough-and-tumble Aussie newspaper business. Way back in the 1960s, before Murdoch set out to take over the world, he learned a useful lesson in Australia’s Outback: don’t start a circulation war in the wrong place.

Compelling Adventure in a Spanish Village (review)

With Don’t Miss the Fiesta!  journalist and author David Baird (born in Shropshire, England) does a remarkable job both of entertaining and enlightening his readers, writes Miguel Booth, Hispanist, writer and polemicist.

At first glance this engaging book is just a compelling tale of mystery and adventure: Scully, a degenerate British fraudster takes refuge in a remote Andalusian mountain village, bringing with him his baggage of regrets and sordid secrets. But he’s unaware of the mysteries the seemingly innocent village of Benamargo harbors. A hint: The name itself denotes bitterness.

On another level the book is a vibrant fictionalized account of the secret lives of so many real-life Spanish villages which—at the time the story is set, in the 1980s—were still largely trapped between the hammer of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath, and the anvil of cruel medieval religious “obligations”.



TYPHOON HITS HONG KONG

Maroma Press’s latest book, Typhoon Season, has received a glowing review from — appropriately enough — Hong Kong’s top  daily, the South China Morning Post. Respected writer and academic Douglas Kerr notes:  ”The plot is well crafted and is exceptionally well paced.” 

This is Kerr’s review:

There is a distinctly retro feeling to this novel, and not just because most of the action takes place in Hong Kong in 1980, a distant time when we all got by without mobile phones, reality TV, party politics and Lady Gaga.

What did we do all day? If this book is to be believed, life in Hong Kong in 1980 was lived at breakneck speed. This is a tightly constructed thriller that moves along at a cracking pace, one of those stories in which the hero gets threatened by the bad guys, arrested by the cops, consoled by the girlfriend, bamboozled by the mystery of the missing corpse, knocked unconscious, shot at and almost drowned, with barely time in between to change his shirt.

DARK SECRETS IN SPAIN

WHAT DARK SECRETS lie in wait for a stranger seeking the simple life when he moves to a remote Spanish village?
Long-concealed hatreds, vengeance and passion…an Englishman fleeing his scandalous past collides with them all in an Andalusian village. Learn more in Don’t Miss The Fiesta!.
Award-winning journalist David Baird says that much of his book is based on personal experience — he has lived in Spain for many years.
The book will strike a chord with quite a few readers as it tells how the expat escapist falls for a local girl but then discovers dark secrets and a nightmare of guilt lurk below the village’s placid surface.
One sinister event succeeds another, leading to a dramatic climax.