Nostalgia is too often dismissed as a conservative retreat into the past. Peter Glazer's passionate account of the memory of Americans who fought in the Spanish Civil War and the manner in which they performed their past, however, makes a brilliant case not only for the progressive potential of nostalgia but for the power of the vision that animated the ... Read moreold-left in the first place.
John Bodnar, Chancellor's Professor and Chair, Department of History, Indiana University
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Radical Nostalgia asks and answers important questions about the meaning of memory and the politics of history. Peter Glazer's warm, empathetic, and insightful study of ceremonies commemorating the Spanish Civil War in the U.S. helps us understand the power of the past in our lives.
George Lipsitz, author of American Studies in a Moment of Danger, Professor of American Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
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Glazer begins this story of commemoration with the veterans themselves, and their great longing for resolution that came with loss in Spain, their search for purpose in the present, their struggle to maintian community in the face of political repression . . . Glazer reveals a nostalgia that is active, creative, often tormented, but rarely frozen in a past. . . . Commemoration serves as an umbrella covering a variety of people, giving them a shelter from an often hostile world and invigorating them to step foward.
THE VOLUNTEER, December 2005
Peter Glazer reframes, and in some ways reclaims, the concept of nostalgia as a way of reconnecting with the progressive politics of the past. . . . Glazer's participant-observer perspective and the clear frankness with which he positions himself within his subject prove most compelling.
E. J. Westlake
MODERN DRAMA, Fall 2008
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