Portugal Books

The most "ignorant" Pessoa heteromy Caeiro is a nature lover who doesn't care of anything else. For him, the senses, his senses, particulary the vision, are of great importance because it is they what give the possibility to Caeiro enjoy the beautiful nature that surrounds him, the nature he loves. In a set of astounding poems he explains his way of thinking, how nature is the most important thing of human existence, his idea that all should be seen, not thought. To think is to be sick with our eyes closed. Caeiro goes on, describing feelings and situations, maybe in a way a naive person with little culture would describe. In fact, this heteronym only has 4th degree and is a very simple person. But his filosofy, contrary to what looks like at first sight, is far from being simple, and Caeiro is far from being a "ignorant" human being. The more we read is poems more we see the greatness of his "simple" ideas. At the same time we ask ourselves about our own lives and the way we see the world. And at the end the question: "Isn't he right?..."

This book about traveling in Spain masks itself as a children's book, but, in reality, it has been a Godsend to adults as well. Ms. Biggs' style is informal, fun, yet highly informative; it will get you where you want to go as well as to more off-the-beaten-track surprises. The drawings are charming, and children, as well as adults, would be well-advised to take this little compendium with them to Spain. Too bad it is out of print. Muir press should reconsider.

A splendid book, superbly researched. A must read for all interested in cultural, political and artisitic exchanges between Asia and Europe in the Renaissance. A scholarly study which will remain the definitive study of Ceylon and Portugal in the Renaissance for a long time to come.


The Development of Cathararine of Austria's Collection in the Queen's Household: Its Character and Cost
Black Africans in Renaissance Europe
Encounters: The Meeting of Asia and Europe 1500 - 1800

This series of city gudes are wonderful for any traveler. They are handy and small enough to fit in a pocket. They provide useful information at a glance.

En la memoria colectiva del espanol persisten las huellas de un pasado politico atormentado, de un historia tragica repita una y otra vez, que habla de conflicto, represion, exilo y muerte. Esta historia, sin embargo, parece haber llegado a un final feliz: La Democracia En Espana se halla plenamente asentada en la actualidad, gracias a una Constitucion basado en un consenso extraordinariamente mayoritario. Tomando precisamente como "indice" los grandes apartados de la Magna Carta espanola, Joaquin Garcia Morillo propone un recorrido ameno e instructivo por nuestro sistema politico, en el que se puede apreciar la magnitude del cambio que ha experimentado Espana en los ultimos anos. Las claves de la estructura del poder, su ejercicio y sus limites se exponen sin pasar por alto algunos de los aspectos que han llegado a ser mas polemicos en el funcionamiento de neustra democracia, como la independencia del poder judicial, la inmunidad parlamentaria, la limitacion de la propia soberania como resultado de la convergencia europea, las formas en que distintos grupos de presion - a traves, por ejemplo, de la prensa - pueden influir en el Gobierno, los juicios por jurado, etc.
--- from book's back cover

COMO TODOS LOS LIBROS DE ESTE AUTOR.

El autor es un gran ser humano. Me consta.

Atentamente,

El Cacique.

Even though I have a fairly good level of reading comprehension of Spanish in general, I find the language of Spanish drama of this period to be difficult to understand. Many times I have tried to read La Vida es Sueno without commentary, only to put it aside. This edition with notes by Vincent Martin is excellent. There are helpful footnotes on particularly difficult verses and archaic words have a definition on the same page. One feature that is truly beneficial is the very succinct introductory explanation of prosody and line scanning. I have always been baffled by the meter of dramatic poetry in de la Barca and de Vega, but not anymore. The only negative criticism is that the definition of the archaic words are printed on the right hand margin and often spill over to the next line where another definition begins. This can be confusing and takes some adjustment to understand. Ideally the play should be read without any notes, but for those who are in the position of requiring a commentary, this is a fantastic tool for obtaining a thorough comprehension of La Vida Es Sueno. Hopefully the publisher Cervantes and Co will provide us with more plays in this format. The commentary is in English.

It's such a relief to have the Siete Partidas available in this attractive, reasonably priced set. The venerable Robert I. Burns has given it a wonderful general introduction and the index increases its accesibility even more than the very clear translation does. No more ploughing through paragraph after paragraph of Old Spanish, in 19th-century print, to get to the enlightening and even entertaining ideas that so well characterize the 13th century and give sociological background to any kind of medieval research.

The earthquake that hit Lisbon on 1 November 1755 shook up a lot more than its buildings and citizens. There were repercussions for science, religion, philosophy, politics, and literature. In _The Last Day: Wrath, Ruin, and Reason in the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755_ (Viking) Nicholas Shrady gives a compelling short account of the disaster itself, and the history of the events leading up to it, but spends far more of the pages in a fascinating description of the effects of the quake in local and global history. There have been bigger disasters, even in our own times, but this one was not only big, but it made gigantic differences even in the way humans looked at their place in the world. Shrady says that because of this particular disaster in a particular place, all people all over the world "from staunch clerics to enlightened philosophers were compelled to re-examine their most cherished dogmas." We are still living with some of the changes the earthquake wrought.

José I may have been king, but Portugal was largely ruled by the church which was the largest landowner and which supported the justly-feared Holy Office of the Inquisition. Every traveler noted how pious the inhabitants were, but many of them were in church when the disaster began, first with tremors, then violent waves from the sea, then from fire from all the household fireplaces that were beneath the collapsed buildings. Ten percent of the populace was wiped out. As in all disasters or diseases, there were those who knew that God was sending a message to those afflicted. The message, however, did not make sense. Lisbon was no worse than any large city, and demonstrably more pious than the others. The flawed hero of this book, the Portuguese Secretary of State, Sebastião Carvalho, realized that blaming people's sinfulness for the disaster would only undercut his efforts to bring them together to surmount it. The changes in thinking were not just religious, but more broadly philosophical. The most famous changes came in Voltaire's reaction to the ideas of Leibnitz, who reasoned that if the world was the product of a benevolent and all-powerful God, then it must be the best of all possible worlds, no matter how hard it is for us to see the goodness. In 1759, Voltaire published _Candide_, a rollicking, bawdy, fast-moving tale of inexplicable ups-and-downs, including the main characters' presence in the Lisbon earthquake. The book made fun not only of Leibnitz's philosophy, but of the Church, the Inquisition, the nobility, the military, and more. It isn't surprising that governments tried to suppress it, and also not surprising that it became a bestseller. There was no sense in trying to figure out how the world is the best possible one, the book shows; we must simply get on with the duties of our lives. It was a stylistic death-blow to deistic optimism.

It also was part of a new mood of skepticism that encouraged scientific explanations of catastrophes rather than religious explanations. Carvalho arranged for a survey to be widely distributed, to document how people perceived the earthquake and its effects, answering questions like "Did you perceive the shock to be greater from one direction than another?" or "Did the sea rise or fall first?" The undulating waves of the ground reported by many who survived may have triggered the first ideas that earthquakes spread as waves; the first theories of wave motion within the Earth were put forward by English physicist John Mitchell in 1760. The Lisbon earthquake, then, was the beginning of seismology. A new city was designed from scratch, on an enlightened rational grid that became a model for the future rebuilding of Paris. Military engineers constructed the first buildings in Europe designed to withstand earthquakes. Shrady writes that the "disaster would also usher in a new era, one in which a wholesome sense of doubt and the powers of reason would replace the certainties of religious dogma, and the numbing resignation that providence instilled would give way to the liberation of human promise." But he also reminds us that the new era is not completely arrived, for there will always be those that take sanctimonious satisfaction in the punishment God deals out to others. The retired archbishop of New Orleans, for instance, insisted that hurricane Katrina was deserved chastisement for sexual attitudes, abortions, and drug addiction. Lisbon's lessons are not yet universal.