Spanish Recognitions : The Roads to the Present

by SETTLE MARY LEE

• ISBN13: 9780393020274
• ISBN10: 0393020274
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-04-01
• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc

Summary

A book of discovery, in which the landscape of Spain, its history, and its people flow together, each explaining the other. Mary Lee Settle, at the age of eighty-two, set off alone to find the Spain she thought she knew from guidebooks, from friends, and even from her own earlier trip there. But, like Columbus on another voyage of discovery, she found somethingmany thingsthat she hadn't even known she was looking for. Winner of a National Book Award for fiction and author of an acclaimed book of travel and history on Turkey, Settle brings to her task the visual equivalent of perfect pitch. She has no interest in tourist destinations; instead she follows, slowly and with no itinerary, the great, traumatic flows in Spanish history: the Moorish conquest from south to north, and the Christian reconquista, several hundred years later in the opposite direction. Those epic struggles, shaped by geography, are the source of the fascinating tensions in the Spanish character, in its art, architecture, and literature, and the author's magical prose puts these gifts in our hands. Map, 12 pages of illustrations.

Author Biography

Mary Lee Settle is the author of many novels, including The Beulah Quintet and Blood Tie, for which she received a National Book Award. She lives in Kinsale, Virginia.

Table of Contents

A Traveler Between	p. 9
Madrid	p. 17
Castile	p. 33
Avila	p. 53
Tordesillas	p. 75
In the Meseta	p. 95
Zamora	p. 100
Salamanca	p. 123
Extremadura	p. 142
Guadalupe	p. 156
Shadows	p. 173
Merida	p. 190
Islam	p. 213
Caliphate	p. 221
The End of the Reconquista	p. 247
Granada	p. 268
Duende	p. 284
Holiday	p. 311
Tartessos	p. 325
Palos de la Frontera	p. 342
Endnote	p. 355
Recommended Books	p. 357
Table of Contents provided by Rittenhouse. All Rights Reserved.