Portugal Books

this super light weight book showing the path to Santiago is an excellent alternative to taking a guide book with you if you are planning to walk the Camino Frances. It lists the albergues and hotels in all the villages along the way, along with other services offered - cash points, supermarkets, churches, etc. Spiral bound, well layed out, good town maps of the 5 biggest towns along the way. Highly recommended.

As Commandant Var, editor of these memoirs, remarks, a lot has been written about the Peninsular War, and that was in 1910; he would be appalled at the flood of words since then. We are familiar with the eyewitness accounts from Marbot and Rocca amongst the French, Kincaid, Schaumann, Harris et.al. from the British. The work I review here is not in the usually-quoted canon, perhaps because its author was present at relatively few of the major battles, and his reporting of those few is frankly dodgy. In all other respects, however, this book deserves to rank with the very greatest of Peninsular memoirs; it is a terrible shame that it has rarely been available, and (so far as I know) never in English. Its importance is that it is an infantry company officer's account, not (like Marbot and Rocca) a cavalryman's, and in its extraordinary frankness about the conditions of service and the deeds both great and infamous of the French troops in Spain and Portugal. As many historians have noted, the social distance between junior officers and enlisted men was less in the French army than in any other of the period, and Marcel was a promoted ranker who saw things very much from the perspective of his 'vieilles moustaches'. In the absence of a French Rifleman Harris from the Peninsula, Marcel is as near as we are going to get to the French private soldier's experience of the war.

Marcel was the son of a small wine-grower from Champagne who joined the Sixty-Ninth Ligne (their number inspired Napoleon to a rude joke when he led them in Spain, and Web censorship prevents me giving it in numerals) in 1805, just after the French victory at Jena, and served with them in the German campaigns of 1806-7. In 1808 they were quartered at ease in Silesia when they were among the regiments scrambled to retrieve France's crumbling position in Spain in the aftermath of Bailen. Marcel was by then a sergeant and had already joined the voltigeur company of the 3e bataillon, where he remained throughout the rest of his service (apart from a brief catastrophic appointment to Foy's staff that resulted in a spell in the guardhouse for insubordination). He was field commissioned as sous-lieutenant in 1810 and finished the war as captain commanding the voltigeur company. He was wounded at Salamanca and again at the Ile de Broc in 1814. Perhaps for that reason, though an ardent Bonapartist, he was not active during the Hundred Days. He retired to his farm in Champagne and died, a figure of local respect, in 1845.

Marcel belonged to that type of hyper-patriot who is willing to attribute defeat to treachery or cowardice on his own side rather than concede any superiority to the enemy. Hence, his testimony regarding actions with the British (most of which the French lost) is of dubious value. Talavera (where the Sixty-Ninth was not engaged) is given as a French victory, Busaco (where they were in the thick of it), is attributed to incompetence (with hints of treachery) by Massena, Hill's masterly raid on Puente de Almaraz (where they provided part of the garrison) succeeded because of Foy's incompetence and the cowardice of the 76e Ligne, all was going well at Salamanca up to 4 p.m. ... and so it goes on.

What makes Marcel a 'must-read', however, is his frank eyewitness accounts of smaller-scale events and of conditions at small-unit level. This includes of course the ever-worsening spiral of atrocity and counter-atrocity. His battalion was specifically tasked with the reprisal sack and massacre at Camarinas, where a foraging-party of French dragoons had been slaughtered in their beds; of those inhabitants they caught, the only ones not killed immediately were shot or bayonetted after being forced to carry the loot to the battalion's bivouac. Later in the war he describes equally terrible events at Castro-Urriales, where there was not even the excuse of prior Spanish atrocities; there were many others in the intervening years. He is equally valuable for his testimony on the day-to-day abominable conditions under which the French troops operated. Near-starvation was a routine condition: for the march from Galicia to central Spain, the troops were issued four days' rations which they had to make last for twenty, and at a later stage, Marcel's company subsisted for weeks on soup made from roadside weeds. During the incessant rains in Galicia the Sixty-Ninth was reduced to a regiment of spearmen because not a single musket would fire.

Marcel represents the French junior officer corps at its best and worst. He is intensely proud of his men and of being appointed to lead them, always leading from the front, courageous, energetic, able to function effectively when starving and exhausted, and capable of inspiring to action men who were suffering even more than himself. But at the same time he is a self-assertive little jerk ('petit-maitre' was the old French term for such a man) who revelled in seducing and abandoning Spanish women. Anyone who has pondered the deep hatred of the resurgent Germans for the French in 1813-15 might reflect that they had for years had tens of thousands of Marcels quartered on them.

[...]

Esta novela obtuvo el premio de Primavera de Novela (2004) en España.

En ella el personaje Juan Faura, pasa primero como legionario en la guerra que España mantuvo en Marruecos en los años 20 y posteriormente como soldado del ejército republicano en la guerra Civil del 36-39.

Los dos escenarios históricos, se unen a través de la pasión que este personaje siente por un antiguo amor juvenil, con la que vive tras su vuelta del frente Marruecos, una tórrida pasión.

El la parte final de la novela, de nuevo la guerra, esta vez la Civil, con sus horrores y curioso trágico encuentro con quien una vez compartió sueños de jóven en el frente de Marruecos.

Carlos Ortega
2006-01-27

A very complete information about Cartagena, if you read it before you travel to this city, when you are here you will know all about the city, the exploring places, restaurants, hotels, shopping, etc. It will be if you were been here before. If you will think to travel Cartagena and you want to know all about it, you will need to read this book before.

I read this book as a part of research on the discovery of DNA. It had more than just good information. The book was written in such a way that it made reading the book interesting. Most books on discoveries tend to be dull. But this book is more like a story, the story of DNA. I would recomend this book to people who are interested in the topic. My favorite part is the foward, it is so true that it is difficult to see the work that led up to major discoveries.

ANY SCHOLAR OF CERVANTES AND DON QUIJOTE SHOULD READ THIS BOOK!NEW UNDISCOVERED REFERENCES ABOUT THE WORLD'S GREATEST AUTHOR ARE CONTAINED WITHIN!

This superb book studies the connection between slavery in West Africa and the British, and Quaker, firm of Cadbury, particularly in the first decade of the twentieth century.

From the 15th century, the slave trade was the foundation of the Portuguese empire. Even in the early 1900s, Angola was still a slave state, with half its people enslaved. The British Empire was an ally of Portugal, so it was complicit in the slavery. Portugal's islands of Sao Tome and Principe, 150 miles off Africa's west coast, had 40,000 slaves producing cocoa beans which Cadbury had been buying since 1886. From 1901 to 1908, Cadbury got half its beans from the islands.

A Foreign Office official noted, "The fact of the matter is that the system is neither more nor less than slavery but that we do not dare to say much as we might thus offend the Portuguese with whom we desire to stand well." In the 1900s, the British Empire was trying to recruit African labour from Portuguese Africa for its gold mines in South Africa. The Foreign Office warned against the "danger of learning inconvenient facts which might oblige us to make representations to the Portuguese Govt. which we don't want to do." So Britain, like Portugal, ignored the treaties obliging them to act to halt the slave trade. Prime Minister Lord Salisbury ordered, "Leave it alone."

In 1901, William Cadbury first heard rumours of slave labour on the islands. All the evidence that he later received confirmed that there was a brutal slave trade in Angola, that the labourers on the islands were forced, that the death rate was huge (often 20% a year), and that none was free ever to leave. Yet Cadbury did not boycott the products of slave labour until 1909.

The company claimed that discreet diplomacy, and continued purchase of Sao Tome's cocoa, would improve the workers' position. Their position, however, did not improve: 6,000 slaves died every year, though profits certainly increased, as did the number of slaves and the amount of cocoa exported.

Humanitarian pressure groups tried to get the British government to act in the labourers' interests. It responded with endless promises to press the Portuguese state to reform, and repeated investigations and commissions. This all proves the folly of relying on companies, pressure groups, treaties or governments to effect improvement. Angola and the islands used forced labour until they won independence from Portugal in 1975.

How we have progressed since then! Such outrages are long gone. Yet in 2001, the Financial Times reported, "Nestle and Cadbury were accused of turning a blind eye to child slavery in the cocoa industry." A 2002 study estimated that 284,000 children worked in West Africa's cocoa farms. Another study concluded that there were 15,000 child slaves in the Ivory Coast alone. Cadbury responded, "We were completely unaware of the allegations concerning cocoa growing in the Cote d'Ivoire." Plus ca change.

The USA spends $8.5 billion a year on chocolate products, Britain spends £4 billion, while the children who produce the chocolate toil in poverty and slavery.

I was in search of anything revealing the secrets of Christmas customs and traditions in Spain. My search took me to the Virgina Beach Library where, lo and behold!, I found Christmas in Spain by Valjean McLenighan, published by Passport Books. This was the only comprehnesive resource I was able to find. I am delighted to say it was quite suitable for a college level Spanish class project. McLenighan organized the book in chapters catering to general information and specific celebrations throughout the season. It addressed rural and urban culture. It included information about food, decorations, music, art, the Nativity, Noche Buena, Christmas Day, New Year celebrations, and Three King's day. I was particularly pleased with the amount of time and effort invested by the author in regional customs and their history. I was able to make ornaments and a nacimiento from the directions provided. McLenighan made reading and learning easier by including terms and meanings. I recommend this book for teachers and students to utilize as a comprehensive resource for Christmas traditions in Spain.

Washington Irving is known to most americans as the author of Rip Van Winkle and Sleepy Hollow -but he was also a hispanophile and historian, and wrote this account of the 'reconquista' - the series of events and military campaigns that led to the expulsion of the moors after 700 years on the Iberian peninsula.

Despite his obvious love of all things Spanish, the account is quite balanced even showing sympathy for the Moors. Despite being written over 150 years ago Irving's prose is lively and engaging.

This particular edition is a reprint small press and pretty good quality.

A beautiful first effort from Cuadros, who died shortly before the book was published. Poems and short stories. He writes with anger and nostalgia about growing up in California, learning who his friends were, discovering himself as a gay man, wrestling with AIDS, and keeping people close. A tough book to read, but worth it.