La Ruptura / The Breaking Point

When John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway went to Spain to witness the Spanish Civil War firsthand, the devastation they met was far from impersonal: As Spain was unraveling thread by thread, so was their friendship. They had arrived in Spain as comrades, leftist writers-in-arms. But when Dos Passos's friend Jose Robles went missing, Dos Passos's search for Robles would eventually take his literary career and his friendship with Hemingway to the breaking point.

"A gripping narrative.... [The Breaking Point] dexterously navigates the political minefields of the era and has the pace and drama of a detective novel. There are many books on writers and the Spanish Civil War. This is one of the most important and original, and one of the very best." (New York Sun) "A definitive account of this defining moment in 20th-century intellectual history." (Weekly Standard)

"What makes The Breaking Point such stampede reading-a kind of Guernica-is precisely Koch's partisanship, a furious choosing of sides in the bloody past, back when history was breaking hearts." (Harper's)