PANORAMA DE LA CIVILIZACION ESPANOLA.
By Francisco Ugarte. NewYork: Odyssey Press, 1963. 400 pp. $5.00.
This beautifully printed, superbly illustrated volume is the newest in the series of Francisco Ugarte's presentations of Spanish civilization and literature. Like the others, it is addressed to the American college student.
But Panorama stands apart from don Francisco's other books, and it stands alone in the whole field of works on Hispanic civilization. For although it observes a roughly chronological trajectory from pre-historic Spain to the post-Civil War period, it is less concerned with chronology for its own sake than with a presentation of a number of themes and problematical topics which form the subsoil of Spanish life and thought. It is in this sense a completely original work.
Professor Ugarte has made available to the non-specialist, for the first time, the results of the pathfinding researches of such Olympian figures as Menendez Pidal and Castro. But far from being a scissors-and paste job of journalistic reporting, Panorama is a meditative and ripened assimilation of the wealth of new information and interpretation which has flooded the field of Spanish historiography in recent years.
Among the most masterly chapters in the book are those devoted to Visigothic Spain, the cultural life of the Spanish Jews and Arabs, the cult and influence of St. James of Compostela, and the complex social and intellectual life of twentieth-century Spain. These concerns, and many others, are treated with elegance, erudition, and exemplary clarity. Nowhere has Professor Ugarte fulfilled more nobly his mission as interpreter to North Americans of Spanish civilization, of what it is to be Spanish.
As a piece of book production, the volume is notable. It incorporates a beautifully clear format and over 150 photographs which are fresh, true, and striking. The book is a pleasure to contemplate, as well as a delight to read.
This one-of-a-kind achievement should prove immediately attractive, not only to the students to whom it is addressed, but to numbers of others who will be encouraged by the intrinsically fascinating material, presented in a clear Spanish style, to refresh their acquaintance with Spain and her civilization.
