Portugal Books

Revolutionary Peace through Ethnic Studies is a groundbreaking study by Jose Hernandez Alvarez (a professor in the Department of Africana and Puerto Rican/Latino Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York for eighteen years) that seeks to isolate the unique elements that distinguish a "culture of war" - one that tends toward violence and force to resolve disputes - from a "culture of peace" - one that tends toward negotiation and cooperation to resolve disputes. Searching through the annals of history, Revolutionary Peace through Ethnic Studies reviews the positive and negative lessons to be learned from Spanish colonialism and empire-building, Latin American syncretism, Caribbean isolation, twentieth-century American history and much more. Eschewing partisan politics, such as heavy-handed tendencies to browbeat conservative vs. liberal or assimilationist vs. multicultural points of view into the reader's brain, Revolutionary Peace through Ethnic Studies instead gradually leads the reader to the big questions: How can nation-states improve domestic harmony in the present day? How can the United States best serve as a leader for world peace? A welcome and much-needed addition to modern political science shelves, especially recommended for college library collections, that deserves to be required reading for aspiring politicians - especially in America's modern era of demographical shift toward an increasingly Latino population.

This book, this series of books actually, is a beautiful guide to some very special and romantic inns and hotels throughout Portugal. During our two weeks in that country, we stayed at 6 or 7 places that we found in this guide and they were always wonderful.

I found this book a bit heavy on the historic side of things when I first read it. Originally I was looking for a more practical guide to the river and it's communities as part of a canoe trip from Aranda de Duero in Spain to Oporto in Portugal. However, it's been a few years since I completed that adventure and now I'm settling down in the Duero region so the book has become a much more interesting part of my library. This is an incredible part of the world and this book is a good source of information - although an update wouldn't go amiss at this stage...

My constant companion for our tour of the interior of Mallorca. Invaluable detail for choosing which backroads, short cuts and walks to take. Durable and with a decent amount of overlap of the content on opposite sides of the map, it's easy to use.

What a sturdy map that can really take a beating. More importantly, it's easy to read and travels/refolds well. If you've never driven in Portugal, you're in for a treat. Consider yourself warned. This map will be invaluable as you get lost over and over again, wondering where the sign was before you hit the roundabout. This map is comprehensive and easy to follow.

I travel alot and typically buy another brand of travel books. My boyfriend actually bought this book, and thank goodness he did since it is the greatest book I have ever used for recommendations on places to shop and eat. Every single place we ate in from this book (and we tried alot), was as described and very very good. I am looking forward to going to travel again using this brand of books!!!

This is my first experience with the Rough Guide series and I am overwhelmingly pleased. The Costa Brava is usually "added" to guides on Barcelona and is given very little space in guides to Spain. This is a jewel...concise, informative, covers the smaller places that other guides do not mention. Very nicely done little book - it's definitely going to be one of the "chosen few" that we take with us on our trip to Costa Brava and Barcelona this Fall.

I bought this Rough Guide for my next holidays, before it was even printed, knowing I would risk not to receive it in time for my departure.
In the meantime it started popping up unto the shelves of my favourite bookshop, while all of my friends joked me about my pourchase, which I would have needed to resell coming back from holidays.
But Amazon surprised me again and they delivered it before the scheduled date and I am so far studying it!
I believe Rough Guide Directions are an even better tipe of guides, for the tourist who wants to grab a good bite of the place with an indepth knowledge without all the fuss of a boring lecture.
Thanks for asking me. Bianca

The author gathered Portuguese recipes from family and friends for her Flavors of Portugal, so the book holds many surprises you won't discover in competing Portuguese cookbooks. Color photos pack a survey that also includes both cultural notes and insights on recipe origins and oddities. Dishes such as Traditional Oven-Roasted Sardines and Shrimp Rissoles make the most of seafood, so access to a good fresh seafood market is essential. Readers with such access will find this a very inviting guide to not just the cuisine of Portugal, but its culture.

Sacred Eroticism: Georges Bataille And Pierre Klossowski in the Latin America Erotic Novel by Juan Carlos Ubilluz (The Bucknell Studies in Latin American Literature and Theory: Bucknell University Press) rather than a gross exaggeration or a rash generalization, it would be simply an understatement to say that a large part of Latin American erotic literature is deeply rooted in mysticism. One needs no more than a superficial glance at the region's fiction to apprehend that erotic mysticism is a literary tremor that inhabits its different aesthetic trends. This may be perceived either in the metaphysical neobaroque Jose Lezama Lima of Paradiso or the Spencerian primitivist Alejo Carpentier of Los pasos perdidos [The Lost Steps] (1953), in the surrealist-existentialist Julio Cortázar of Rayuela [Hopscotch] (1963) or in the neo-Parnassian Mario Vargas Llosa of Elogio de la madrastra [In Praise of the Stepmother] (1988), in the avant-garde neobaroque Severo Sarduy of Cobra (1972) or in the Musilian classicist Juan Garcia Ponce of La cabana [The Cabin] (1969), in the experimental Carlos Fuentes of Aura (1962) or the cold Kafkaesque detachment of Virgilio Piñera's La came de Rene [Rene's Flesh] (1952), and in the rupturist écriture feminine of Alejandra Pizarnic's La condesa sangrienta [The Bloody Countess] (1971) or in the surrealist Octavio Paz of Piedra del sol [Sunstone] (1957) As the reader proceeds to complete the list on his/her own, he/she will inevitably wonder: How can this be so? How can such different writers equally choose to imbue their erotic writing with mysticism? The answer to these questions may be found in their inversion. How can this not be so? How can the atheist or agnostic writers raised in the strong Catholic tradition of an incompletely modern continent not channel the remnants of their religious spirit toward erotic literature?
Let us elaborate a bit on these rhetorical questions. Building on Cassirer's insights, David Harvey observes that the project of mo¬dernity (as conceived in the Enlightenment era) was eminently a "secular movement" that "embraced the idea of progress" while actively seeking "the demystification and desacralization of knowl¬edge and social organization in order to liberate human beings from their chains" (1990, 12). Whether one describes Latin America's modernity as imperfect, defective, incomplete, uneven, peripheral, or merely idiosyncratic, it is clearly the case it has not yet taken its secular aspirations as far as to demystify and desacralize the synch¬retic Catholicism that has variously shaped the region's social orga¬nization. Raised in a strong religious environment, the Latin American writer came to question at some point of his/her life the orthodoxy of his/her religious faith. It would be somewhat naive, however, to believe that the assumption of metaphysical doubt or unbelief could have simply extinguished the religious fervor that came with his/her strong Catholic socialization. In my view, this fervor pervaded his/her mature existence as an elated extra-rationalist manner of looking at the world--in short, as a symptom that clings to modernity's secularized rationalism. It is indeed hard, if not impossible, to detail the different infiltrations of this religious drive into the existence of different writers. To briefly advance a few bold examples, in the personal arena, this drive metamorphosed into a heightened devotion to romantic love and sexuality (or even to the brothel, in the case of male authors), and in the political arena, it evolved into a theological embrace of Marxism or the mystification of Che Guevara and Eva Perón. Coming now to the field of literature, it pushed the limits of literary realism toward the Mayan and Incan weltanschauungen of Miguel Angel Asturias and Jose Maria Arguedas, the marvelous American real ("lo real maravilloso americano") of Alejo Carpentier, and the magical realism ("realismo mágico") of Juan Rulfo and Gabriel Garcia Márquez. And remaining within literature so as to return finally to the object of our concern, this impulse toward the sacred found a discursive outlet in erotic fiction as a mystification of the sexual act and writing itself.
Now, unbeknownst to them, many Latin American authors echo Georges Bataille and Pierre Klossowski in their complex turning away from religious tradition. The former as an adolescent, the latter as an adult, Bataille and Klossowski entered the Catholic seminary only to eventually question their faith. Just like their Latin American counterparts, they did not turn their open defiance of church and God into an embrace of a rational modernity; instead, they transposed their religious spirit onto a vital, intellectual, and literary quest for an absent sacred. During the interwar period, for example, this quest materialized as an attempt to revive the sacred in modernity through the creation of Acéphale (a secret and ritualistic pagan society) and the foundation of the College de Sociologie (a community of knowledge dedicated to the study of past and present manifestations of the sacred). But more importantly for thefocus of this study, their rejection of Catholicism led them to search for the sacred in eroticism and to ultimately become perhaps the most important fiction writers and theorists of eroticism in interwar and postwar Europe.
Since Bataille and Klossowski share with many Latin American authors the double defiance of modernity and religious tradition along with the maintenance of a quasi-religious desire for an inti¬mate relation to the world, it is not surprising that the erotic theories and novels of the former two have had a considerable impact on the erotic writing of so many among the latter. What calls our attention instead is that there is almost nothing written on the subject. Although few in number, there are some articles along with book chapters written on the influence of Bataille or Klossowski on a particular Latin American author. But regarding a comprehensive study of this intercontinental influence, there is only Graciela Gliemmo's insightful twelve-page article "La inscripción de una escritura: Georges Bataille en America Latina" [The inscription of a writing: Georges Bataille in Latin America] (1993). Why, one must ask, have critics in the English- and Spanish-speaking academia neglected this important chapter in the history of Latin American literature?