REVIEWS: 'No Pasarán! Writings From the Spanish Civil War,' edited by Pete Ayrton, and 'Born to Run,' by Bruce Springsteen

Edited by Pete Ayrton. (Pegasus Books, 393 pages, $25.95.)

One reason the Spanish Civil War lays such a powerful claim on the Western political imagination is that it was a war about ideas and principles, in which revolutionary combatants sought to create their ideal society even as thousands died on the front.

In this anthology, "No Pasarán!," Peter Ayrton rises above the political infighting and sectarianism and gives us a bottoms-up history as told by working-class Spaniards. Here are stories of farm laborers, priests and village families torn apart by the "two Spains" — between the reactionary-Catholic and the secular-modern divisions in Spanish culture. "One of these two Spains," the great Spanish poet Antonio Machado famously wrote, "will freeze your heart."

We hear from voices like Juan Goytisolo, one of Spain's best-known writers, who loses his mother in a fascist airstrike. Her death fills Goytisolo with "an intense desire for vengeance against an ill-formed universe," and causes him to rebel politically against the closed, conservative circle of his bourgeois family.

From Spanish journalist Arturo Barea, there is the touching story of Father Lobo, a priest who gave moral support to the Republicans and the Anarchists even as members of his priestly caste were being dragged out of their cathedrals and executed in the streets. In another story, Franco supporter Jose Maria Gironella describes a crowd of Communists gleefully torching a Jesuit church, while heaving an immense crucifix into the river.

The majority of the 38 contributors to "No Pasarán!" are Spanish — a refreshing break from the long succession of histories that focus on the exploits of English-speaking writers (Auden, Hemingway and Orwell, to name a few) who joined the fight against fascism.

CHRIS SERRES

Rock fans have been fussing over the revelations in Bruce Springsteen's "Born to Run" in the weeks since its release — his struggles with depression, not beginning to drive until he was 22, breaking bread with the Chairman of the Board — but largely lost in the discussion is the Boss' mastery of the written word.

Perhaps it's no surprise that the dude behind "Thunder Road" can assemble a readable autobiography, but even those who prefer the stylings of Rick Springfield over the Boss will be moved by Springsteen's ability to express himself without an ace band and screaming fans to back him up.

Those who have seen Springsteen in concert — and I pray you're one of them — know how much he embraces heart-stopping, booty-shaking, earth-quaking adjectives in his stage banter. That tendency to ramble at a breathless rate is duplicated here, sometimes to the extent that you wish an editor would have stepped in to demand a period or two. But more often than not, the freewheeling approach works, most notably in elegant essays about the lack of romance in musicians dying young ("I like my gods old, grizzled and here") and another on a dreamlike visit to small-town Texas that unexpectedly transitions into a sharp take on the early stages of depression. Middle-aged couples are encouraged to read his musings on wife Patti Scialfa out loud over Valentine's Day dinner.

The Boss does his fair share of dropping names, but the heart of the story — and his finest work as a memoirist — comes when he writes about his father, a man he admits he hasn't been completely fair to in his music. Springsteen's most moving tribute to Pops came in the introduction to "The River" on the "Live/1975-85," a double album that surprisingly doesn't get a mention here. The son goes deeper here, unveiling a three-dimensional figure who struggled with mental illness. Their late-in-life fishing trips — Dad's way of trying to apologize for being a jerk — are both hilarious and heartbreaking.

In the end, the father will remind you of the characters Springsteen so lovingly presented in his acoustic masterpiece, "Nebraska." What makes this portrait even more poignant is that he was real.