When I was in high school, I had the fortune and misfortune of seeing Picasso's Guernica at the Prado museum in Madrid. Fortune because I have seen one of the greatest masterpieces of art ever created. Misfortune because I was too young to fully appreciate what I was seeing. Yet, of that entire visit to the Prado, Guernica is the only painting I remember - vividly. It disturbed me and stayed with me, though I hardly knew why.[return][return]It seems no surprise then that years later I would finally find a book to put that painting into its horrific context. What was surprising was learning so much about a place and its people that I'd never even considered before. The horrors of war are universal. The people, their culture and the land that is devastated by a single war are not. The author Dave Boling brings these truths together beautifully in "Guernica." I find myself now wanting to read more about the region, particularly in the years following the war. I want to learn more about these proud people who withstood so much.[return][return]The book started off a bit slow for me with so many characters, regions and towns to introduce. I was impatient to understand the significance of it all. However, once the story started moving I could hardly put it down for the suspense. One aspect I really appreciated was the depth of the main male characters, with all of their strengths, machismo, and frailties fully exposed. The female characters were a bit more uni-dimensional, but nonetheless served the purpose of "softening" the story. I almost laughed out loud when I read the following passage: "His slender wife approached pregnancy as she did all other endeavors, unsparingly and witih an energy that infected those around her... If pregnancy rendered some women too ill or uneasy to be intimate, it had an opposite effect on Miren, who became increasingly libidinous." I thought to myself, "Now there's a MAN'S fantasy about what pregnant women are like!" Maybe some of them are, too. Just not myself or any of the dozens of other women I've known who've been pregnant. [return][return]But I digress. Guernica is an impeccably researched, epic story about a place and time memorialized by Picasso, but still misunderstood by many, myself included. Boling's story will hopefully go a long way toward correcting that discrepancy. An easy four stars.