Hemingway's Spain. Photographs by Loomis Dean. Text by Barnaby Conrad [A Copy Inscribed by Loomis Dean].

Photographs of Spain and Spanish culture are accompanied by excerpts from Hemingway's writings about Spain and bullfighting

"With Hemingway, if you didn't like Spain there wasn't much else he wanted to talk to you about," writes Conrad ( Matador ), and though it is undoubtedly odd to tell of Hemingway's fascination with things Spanish in a coffee-table "lifestyle" book, this glossy bastardization of roughshod machismo is, considering the limits of the genre, reasonably informative. We learn a smidgen of bullfighting and Spanish history, as well as Hemingway's attachment to each. But the novelist's well-known enthusiasm for violence is rarely evident in Dean's overly luscious pictures. The photographer's portraits and landscapes demurely avoid the rituals of death to champion the cause of a more wholesome national vitality. Commercial and ploddingly banal, even in shots of the rough-and-tumble of man and bull, Conrad and Dean's version of the Iberian peninsula has little bearing on Hemingway's.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.