Portugal Books

Portugal's photographs of Lois Barragan's unique and timeless buildings are some of the best architectural photography I have ever seen. The majority of books on architects destroy the essence and soul of great designs due to poor, cold, and lifeless images. In this book, the images and the buildings within them raise each other to a higher level. Excellent choice for anyone interested in Modernism and Mexican architecture

if you think this photographs are good, you should look for more of the Salas Portugal works, definetely one of the best mexican landscape photographers.

Pessoa calls Prose "The Dark Clouds of My Horizon" and how aptly too. Nobody writes about the human condition, the bleak, despairing but ever beauteous state of our mysterious lives quite the same way as Pessoa. This is existentialism without the bitterness, the anger and ultimately the denial. This is the documentation of a man who pours out his soul to the world without resorting to pathetic calls for sympathy. The usual blend of inane and manufactured pathos that seem to plague everybody else. This is a man, a man of incredible moral courage and spiritual strength, reporting from the depths of his reflections with no pretensions of offering hope or heartwarming, feelgood sentiments. This is, in short, prose (or poetry) of the highest order. This book is not recommended for everybody, only for people who dare to face their lives and live to their fullest potential.

This is a beautiful, amorphous book which is different everytime one reads it--regardless of the translation. What I mean is...where one stops while reading changes the book...it is 'literally' a different book everytime one reads. This translation is the best by far of those available, I also believe it to be the most scholarly. I have only one proviso: Please, if you can manage it, find a copy of the original printing of this translation, in reprinting they've reduced the scale of the book without resetting so the print is smaller and the bind is not quite as good (if you're like me, you'll likely wear this book out reading it no matter what edition you have). If you can't, by all means buy the reprint, it's not that bad...just regrettable that they had to reduce to save money. THIS IS A LANDMARK OF MODERNISM AND OF POSTMODERNISM...I WOULD EVEN GO AS FAR AS TO SAY THAT IT IS A LANDMARK OF THE UNIVERSAL HUMAN SPIRIT. =)

The Pyrenees boundary between France and Spain began in 1659 as a pretty arbitrary line, but over the course of the next two centuries it was worked out as a national border locally. Sahlins studied the Cerdanya, a valley in the Pyrenees split between France and Spain, and shows how localism formed national identities that were necessary for delineating the boundary.

According to Sahlins, the changes that took place to form the France/Spain boundary were not only a formation of national identity, but also a change in the governments' views of sovereignty, moving from an idea of jurisdiction and dominion over subjects, to territorial control. He shows how policy in the Cerdanya reflected this change from jurisdiction to territory, the change from frontier land to a true boundary.

Sahlins' book is a fascinating look at what makes a nation, and a microcosmic study of the formation of the modern nation-state. His study of the Cerdanya gives the book insights, not just into governmental state-building, but also the construction of identity, the necessity of boundaries for people to define themselves in opposition to the other.

This book is pure genious, focusing on the important issue of nations, identity and borders, specifically the Franco-Spanish border as it was deliniated from the 17th century onward. This is a fascinating account. Most would say that the pyrennes offer an ideal border and they would be correct, but how the nations were able to imprint national idenitities on the clannish localities of the mountains is fascinating reading on a subject most of us would never deighn to think important. A fun and important account, fascinating, ingenious and one of a kind in its originality.

Seth J. Frantzman

Because of the popularity of Pirates of the Caribbean, many books about pirates have been published in the past few years. Most are light-weight works.

The Buccaneer's Realm is Berenson Little's second "backgrounder" about pirates. This former US Navy SEAL officer wants the reader to understand the world that the pirate lived in. This is not the easiest book to read because of the myriad of detail the author presents, but the "ordeal" is well worth the effort

This is one of several excellent books I've read recently about pirates.
My interest was originally sparked in 1995 with David Cordingly's "Under the Black Flag" because this book pictured the privateers/pirates as sea-going guerrillas.

Beside "The Republic of Pirates", the following are worth reading:
Peter Earle Pirate Wars
The Sack of Panama
Stephan Talty Empire of Blue Water
Benerson Little The Sea Rover's Practice
Richard Zacks The Pirate Coast
Frederick C. Leiner End of the Barbary Terror
Colin Woodard The Republic of Pirates
Together these works cover piracy from the late 16th to the early 19th Century.

In 1674 it's three years since Henry Morgan's pirates sacked Panama and peace is spreading - but buccaneers are set to seize opportunity from a failing Spanish Empire and Spain itself produces pirates which will lead to new challenges. Any college-level collection strong in marine history will appreciate this new in-depth focus on pirate culture and history, considering their deeds, the Spanish Main's world and sentiments, and pirate life as a whole. It's a lively survey recommended for any in-depth marine history collection - and many a general college-level world history holding.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

We just traveled from Roncesvillas to Santiago by bicycle. This was an excellent set of maps that we consulted each day to plan and during the day to be sure that we were on the correct route. I only regret that I did not get the guide books that accompany the maps.

This is a very handy and useful little booklet. For my three-week Camino experience I kept the booklet readily accessible in my outside pants pocket. I repeatedly referenced the booklet throughout the day. It's narrow size and the ability to bookmark the page with the flaps on the front and back covers made it easy to retrieve and reference using only one hand. The day-at-a-glance layout, with distance intervals and albergue locations clearly marked plus a profile illustration displaying the changes in altitude along the route make this a very useful reference source. As titled this is a book of maps, there is very little narrative dedicated to recommended sights to see along the way.

Remaining true to its source while rendering Muntaner's unusual prose style in perfectly clear, modern English, this new translation by Robert D. Hughes, preceded by an illuminating introduction by the noted historian Jocelyn Hillgarth, plunges the reader straight into the heart of the frequently internecine world of medieval (western-, central- and eastern-) Mediterranean political relations.
Perfectly placed to render an account of these is the narrator himself, a key figure in the Catalan Grand Company, a mercenary army officially instituted after its signal successes against Angevin forces in the Sicilian campaigns of the dying years of the 13th century. Although, throughout its activities, the Company was ostensibly independent from control by the monarchs of the Catalan Kingdoms, these latter are known to have exercised a degree of influence over its exploits, particularly in matters pertaining to existing rivalries with the ambitious French Houses of Anjou and Valois.
Muntaner personalises his account of the Company's dealings with the Byzantine Empire, the central focus of this story, through his portrayal of Roger of Flor, former Templar, buccaneer, and first leader of the Grand Company. As Muntaner states in the opening lines of this very extract: "I shall speak to you about a brave man of humble origins who, because of his bravery, rose in a short time to a greater height than any man ever born." Because of his close relations to Roger, Muntaner is able to provide further psychological depth not only to this (and other) character(s) but to the esprit de corps uniting these mercenaries under Roger's leadership. Muntaner is thus able to lend not only credibility but a profound sense of justice to the intensely felt notions of honour and chivalry under which this force claimed to operate.
Other translations of Catalan medieval literature are currently under preparation and will be published by Barcino and Tamesis.

This book is one of the most interesting pieces of the European Medieval Literature, although unknown by the general public nowadays. Most Catalan people and tourists know that Muntaner is one of the most important streets of Barcelona, but very few know why. There are no equivalents to that text during the medieval period. This text is only a part of whole Chronicle of Muntaner, but it's the most interesting one. The siege of Gallipoli is, for example, one of finest episodes of the book and also of the whole Catalan literature.

The life of Roger de Flor as told in this Chronicle was the basis of Tirant Lo Blanc, the greatest Catalan novel of the Middle Ages, which is at the same time one of the major influences of the Don Quijote by Cervantes.

Alexander and Sonia Alland have produced a rigorous yet fascinating ethnographic study which will prove of enormous interest to those scholars of anthropology while remaining accessible to the layman. Theirs is fieldwork at its best.
I admire the historic knowledge of the Catalan idiosyncrasy throughout two focus points. Two centers in two countries; Port-Bou, in Catalunya, an autonomous region in Spain, and Cerbère in France.
When we read maps, we see the geographic boundaries but we rarely see maps that indicate the boundaries of language, surely, a more accurate guide to the cultures of the world than politically negotiated frontiers. Catalan, the language, straddles the line of the Pyrenées like a shadow on the landscape of the Principality it once was.
The book portrays the Catalan language heritage, the political prosecutions it has suffered and the different ways of dealing with them Catalan people on both sides of the border have demonstrated. It also reveals the, not very promising, current reality of the language.
Into the living fabric of a language is woven the cultural personality of a nation and it is upon this entity that Alex Alland has directed his attention with dedicated scholarship. Indifference, neglect and persecution have each in their turn taken their toll, but this excellent study shows the pulse of this ancient language yet beats with life.

An absorbing book I cannot recommend too highly.

This book guides us through one of the world's most fascinating regions -- Catalunya, a nation without a state located between France and Spain. The author, Alexander Alland, is an anthropologist who has written extensively about visits to other strange lands and friendly people. Here he provides an excellent background of Catalunya's history and culture, then focuses on two villages, Portbou and Cerbére, where he interviews locals and learns of their struggles to maintain their language and culture in the face of constant change.

In the wake of 9/11 and our military enterprise in Iraq, Americans are asking more informed questions about the relations between Muslims and non-Muslims across the globe. Cervantes in Algiers--a magisterial exploration of the socio-political world of 16th-century North Africa--maps the surprisingly porous frontiers between Muslim and Christian worlds in the early modern period. This pioneering book minutely examines Cervantes's five-year captivity in Algiers and gauges the impact of this traumatic experience on his fiction. As Cervantes himself reminds us in the prologue to Part One of Don Quijote, his great novel was "hatched in a prison." Cervantes in Algiers rethinks the connections between trauma and creativity even as it enlightens the long and vexed history of relations between Islam and the West. A five-judge panel of the Modern Language Association of America awarded this book the 2003 James Russell Lowell Prize for the most outstanding book in Literary Studies.

Cervantes In Algiers: A Captive's Tale is a meticulously researched and scholarly study by Maria Antonia Garces (Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies, Cornell University) of the years that Miguel de Cervantes, the author of the celebrated Hispanic literary masterpiece "Don Quixote", spent as a slave and prisoner of the Muslims in Algiers. Examining how captivity affected Cervantes and his writing, the complex interplay between Christian Spain and Islam, and searching for enduring truths that reflect throughout history and modern times, Cervantes In Algiers is clearly a "must-read" title for any devoted reader or scholar of Cervantes' classic work and enduringly popular work.

I'm a very busy guy who does an awful lot of reading. I made room, however, for this book, and it didn't disappoint. (This is a solid effort!) Eby was able to grab me by the collar and take me back to Spain circa 1936-1939 and place me in the ranks of the Lincoln Battalion. Believe me, I was there.

One important note. Eby does a great job of not romanticizing the Lincolns nor does he demonize their opponents. Very, very balanced.

Written by retired Professor of English Cecil D. Eby, Comrades and Commissars: The Lincoln Battalion in the Spanish Civil War is a fascinating history of 2,800 American fighters who formed a Battalion to fight against Generalissimo Francisco Franco and his right-wing nationalists against the Republican government of Spain during the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930's. Building upon Eby's previous study published in 1969, "Between the Bullet and the Lie", Comrades and Commissars draws from additional data that Eby gathered in recent decades, including the Lincoln Battalion archives that have been hidden in a Moscow storeroom for sixty years. These papers shed light on some of the most provocative questions concerning the Battalion, including which Americans were persecuted or even executed by the brigade commissariat. An in-depth reference, composed by an author with a solid reputation for expertise, balance, and objectivity on the topic, Comrades and Commissars is a welcome addition to world and military history reference shelves.

This Osprey title goes into much greater detail on German participation in Spain during the Guerra Civil. Accurate numbers on German combatants from all services are supplied. There are some details on equipment used, though some more color plates for tanks, artillery and aircraft would have been helpful. The uniform illustrations are the usual Osprey quality. This volume fills some gaps left by the other Osprey titles, the "Spanish Civil War" and "The Spanish Civil War in the Air".

terrific and informative. Excellent color plates. Very good reference for the historian or figure painter.