Some Days You Can’t Save Them All


Ronnie E. Baticulon - 2019
    But a physician’s incorrect diagnosis will always be a matter of life and death. Dr. Baticulon’s dispatches from the country’s leading public hospital are told in language that requires no further acrobatics. How do you tell a mother that the smiling ten-year-old boy in her arms will not survive the following week? How do you tell a little girl she’ll never be able to go home to play because her parents can’t afford P54,000 for her surgery? How do you live with yourself after breaking a promise to save an eight-year-old boy’s life? Like the trenches of war zones, the operating room is the frontline of life’s most difficult questions. Here are a neurosurgeon’s gripping ruminations on hope and loss."—Lourd De Veyra"Ronnie Baticulon follows in the footsteps of many other physicians for whom the task of understanding and healing humanity did not stop at the clinic or the operating room. They used words and language not only for their patients but also for themselves—a long and distinguished line from Rabelais, Chekhov, and Maugham to Michael Crichton, Richard Selzer, Oliver Sacks, and of course our own Jose Rizal and Arturo Rotor. Dr. Baticulon is a worthy addition to that tradition."—Jose Y. Dalisay Jr.

History of the Republic of the Philippines


Gregorio F. Zaide - 1983
    

Ermita: A Filipino Novel


F. Sionil José - 1988
    Sionil Jose's novella, "Obsession." Fabulous protitute, a woman wronged, she is now exposed in her exquisite nudity, surrounded by people like her, Eduardo Dantes, publisher, Senator Andres Bravo, General Bombilla, socialite Conchita Rojo, and Rolando Cruz, Ph.D. in history turned public relations specialist.Ermita is the story of an enclave of privilege and affluence, and the putrefaction of a society. Here is Manila-before 1941, during the tumultuous years of the Japanese Occupation, and the corrupt Marcos regime.

The Crime Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained


Shanna Hogan - 2017
    See the gory details of each crime and how it was solved, with renowned quotes and detailed criminal profiles letting you delve into the criminal mind.The Crime Book looks at the big ideas and concepts in criminology spanning from pirates, kidnapping and political plots to modern con artists, serial killers and rogue traders, including the Black Dahlia investigation, the Mississippi Scheme, and the notorious Jeffrey Dahmer.The Crime Book is the perfect introduction to law enforcement and criminology across history's most infamous crimes.

America Is in the Heart: A Personal History


Carlos Bulosan - 1946
    First published in 1946, this autobiography of the well known Filipino poet describes his boyhood in the Philippines, his voyage to America, and his years of hardship and despair as an itinerant laborer following the harvest trail in the rural West. Bulosan does not spare the reader any of the horrors tha accompanied the migrant's life; but his quiet, stoic voice is the most convincing witness to the terrible events he witnessed.

Insurrecto


Gina Apostol - 2018
    Chiara is working on a film about an incident in Balangiga, Samar, in 1901, when Filipino revolutionaries attacked an American garrison, and in retaliation American soldiers created “a howling wilderness” of the surrounding countryside. Magsalin reads Chiara’s film script and writes her own version. Insurrecto contains within its dramatic action two rival scripts from the filmmaker and the translator—one about a white photographer, the other about a Filipino schoolteacher.Within the spiraling voices and narrative layers of Insurrecto are stories of women—artists, lovers, revolutionaries, daughters—finding their way to their own truths and histories. Using interlocking voices and a kaleidoscopic structure, the novel is startlingly innovative, meditative, and playful. Insurrecto masterfully questions and twists narrative in the manner of Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch, and Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Apostol pushes up against the limits of fiction in order to recover the atrocity in Balangiga, and in so doing, she shows us the dark heart of an untold and forgotten war that would shape the next century of Philippine and American history.

America Is Not the Heart


Elaine Castillo - 2018
    Her uncle, Pol, who has offered her a fresh start and a place to stay in the Bay Area, knows not to ask about her past. And his younger wife, Paz, has learned enough about the might and secrecy of the De Vera family to keep her head down. Only their daughter, Roni, asks Hero why her hands seem to constantly ache.Illuminating the violent political history of the Philippines in the 1980s and 1990s and the insular immigrant communities that spring up in the suburban United States with an uncanny ear for the unspoken intimacies and pain that get buried by the duties of everyday life and family ritual, Castillo delivers a powerful, increasingly relevant novel about the promise of the American dream and the unshakable power of the past. In a voice as immediate and startling as those of Junot Díaz and NoViolet Bulawayo, America Is Not the Heart is a sprawling, soulful telenovela of a debut novel. With exuberance, muscularity, and tenderness, here is a family saga; an origin story; a romance; a narrative of two nations and the people who leave home to grasp at another, sometimes turning back.

In the Country


Mia Alvar - 2015
    Here are exiles, emigrants, and wanderers uprooting their families from the Philippines to begin new lives in the Middle East, the United States, and elsewhere—and, sometimes, turning back again. A pharmacist living in New York smuggles drugs to his ailing father in Manila, only to discover alarming truths about his family and his past. In Bahrain, a Filipina teacher drawn to a special pupil finds, to her surprise, that she is questioning her own marriage. A college student leans on her brother, a laborer in Saudi Arabia, to support her writing ambitions, without realizing that his is the life truly made for fiction. And in the title story, a journalist and a nurse face an unspeakable trauma amidst the political turmoil of the Philippines in the 1970s and ’80s.In the Country speaks to the heart of everyone who has ever searched for a place to call home. From teachers to housemaids, from mothers to sons, Alvar’s powerful debut collection explores the universal experiences of loss, displacement, and the longing to connect across borders both real and imagined. Deeply compassionate and richly felt, In the Country marks the emergence of a formidable new writer.

Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Movements in the Philippines, 1840-1910


Reynaldo Clemeña Ileto - 1979
    Ileto submits to varied kinds of analyses standard documents as well as such previously ignored sources as folk songs, poems, and religious traditions, in order to articulate hidden or suppressed features of the thinking of the masses. Paramount among the conclusions of the book is that the pasyon, or native account of Christ's life, death and resurrection, provided the cultural framework of movements for change. The book places the Philippine revolution in the context of native traditions, and explains the persistence of radial peasant brotherhoods in this century. Seen as continuous attempts by the masses to transform the world in their terms are the various movements that the book analyzes - Apolinario de la Cruz's Cofradia de San Jose, Andres Bonifacio's Katipunan, Macario Sakay's Katipunan, Felipe Salvador's Santa Iglesia, the Colorum Society, and other popular movements during the Spanish, revolutionary, and American colonial periods.

When the Elephants Dance


Tess Uriza Holthe - 2002
    forces battle to possess the Philippine Islands, the Karangalan family hides with their neighbors in a cramped cellar, where they glean hope from the family stories and folktales they tell each other. These stories of love, survival, and family blend the supernatural with the rich, little known history of the Philippines, the centuries of Spanish colonization, the power of the Catholic church, and the colorful worlds of the Spanish, Mestizo, and Filipino cultures.As the villagers tell their stories in the darkened cellar below, Holthe masterfully weaves in the stories of three brave Filipinos--a teenage brother and sister and a guerilla fighter--as they become caught in the battle against the vicious Japanese forces above ground.Inspired by her father's firsthand accounts of this period, Tess Uriza Holthe brings to magical and terrifying life a story of the hope and courage needed to survive in wartime.

Tadhana: The History of the Filipino People


Ferdinand E. Marcos - 1982
    This Set Includes the following:1. Volume 2: Formation of the National Community (1565-1896)2. Volume 2 Part 1: Encounter (1565-1663)3. Volume 2 Part 2: Reaction (1663-1765)4. Volume 2 Part 3: Transition (1765-1815)Contains lots of colorful illustrations and plates.

Philippine History And Government Through The Years


Francisco M. Zulueta
    

Lourd De Veyra's Little Book of Speeches


Lourd Ernest H. de Veyra - 2014
    Inspire action. Encourage thought. They're also full of sarcastic one-liners, biting wit, and colorful cuss words. Compiled from various events to which Lourd De Veyra - journalist, writer, singer, and blogger - has been invited to speak, some of these 25 speeches may read like an uncontrolled stream of consciousness, and some are precisely written pieces with astute observations about life, work, and the world we live in. But all of them will make you want to keep reading.BONUS! Two new speeches by the Lourd himself, just for this book:Sermon sa Mga FashyownPangks Nat Die: Sa Mga Punks ng Pilipinas

The Girl in building C


Mary Krugerud - 2018
    She entered Ah-gwah-ching State Sanatorium at Walker, Minnesota, for what she thought would be a short stay. In January, her tuberculosis spread, and she nearly died. Her recovery required many months of bed rest and medical care.Marilyn loved to write, and the story of her three-year residency at the sanatorium is preserved in hundreds of letters that she mailed back home to her parents, who could visit her only occasionally and whom she missed terribly. The letters functioned as a diary in which Marilyn articulately and candidly recorded her reactions to roommates, medical treatments, Native American nurses, and boredom. She also offers readers the singular perspective of a bed-bound teenager, gossiping about boys, requesting pretty new pajamas, and enjoying Friday evening popcorn parties with other patients.Selections from this cache of letters are woven into an informative narrative that explores the practices and culture of a midcentury tuberculosis sanatorium and fills in long-forgotten details gleaned from recent conversations with Marilyn, who "graduated" from the sanatorium and went on to lead a full, productive life.

The Quiet Ones


Glenn Diaz - 2017
    Soon a couple of friends join in, and the operation proceeds smoothly up until they quit, vowing to take the secret to their graves. A month later, a phone call at 4 in the morning tells Alvin that the police are on their way.At once a workplace novel and a meditation on history and globalization, The Quiet Ones is a grimly humorous take on a soul-sapping, multi-billion-dollar industry. In interlocking narratives, it explores lives rendered mute by irate callers, scripted apologies, and life’s menial violence, but which manage to talk back every now and then, just as long as the Mute button is firmly pressed.Winner, 2017 Palanca Grand PrizeWinner, 37th National Book Award