Jerome R. Mintz (1930–1997) was Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University. His books include Carnival Song and Society: Gossip, Sexuality, and Creativity in Andalusia. James W. Fernandez is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Chicago.
... It is no exaggeration to qualify this work as a significant new contribution to the historiography of Spanish anarchism and also to the social history of the Andalusian peasantry. A more effective prosecution of oral history is rarely to be found. Stanley G. Payne, Journal of Modern History ... a brilliant and moving combination of conventional research and oral history. Raymond Carr, New York Review of Books Mintz convincingly demolishes both liberal and Marxist myths about the Spanish anarchists, and compellingly depicts their real world in a classic revolutionary historiography. Nicholas Walter, New Statesman This is an extraordinarily affecting and profound account of the anarchist movement in Spain, from the perspective of the ordinary women and men who constituted its core and whose lives were roiled by its turbulence. As a demonstration of how anthropologists can understand the grand events of history as forms of experience that resonate in everyday life for long decades after they occur, this book has become a historical milestone in its own right. Michael Herzfeld For its intelligence and humanitarian achievements, for its political honesty, for its power and its beauty (there is no other word), this book deserves to be called a masterpiece. David D. Gilmore, American Ethnologist