Dreadful and frightening monsters have come to destroy a small rural village. Only Isdaman, the little Filipino superhero, dares to stand up to them! However, he is just one boy-does he have what it takes to defend the village and bring back the peace? Join Isdaman as he battles foe after foe throughout the breathtaking lands of the Isles of the Philippines.

This book is about José Protasio Rizal Mercado y Alonso Realonda, widely known as José Rizal (June 19, 1861 – December 30, 1896). He was a Filipino nationalist and polymath during the tail end of the Spanish colonial period of the Philippines. An ophthalmologist by profession, Rizal became a writer and a key member of the Filipino Propaganda Movement which advocated political reforms for the colony under Spain. He was executed by the Spanish colonial government for the crime of rebellion after an anti-dd revolution, inspired in part by his writings, broke out. Though he was not actively involved in its planning or conduct, he ultimately approved of its goals which eventually led to Philippine independence.

Magdalo was the nom de guerre of a man named Emilio Aguinaldo, a revolutionary hero in the mold of William Wallace, George Washington, and Emiliano Zapata. Spain ruled over the Philippine Islands for more than 300 years, finally causing a violent rebellion led by Magdalo in 1896. The United States allied with him in the 1898 war against Spain; he secured land while Admiral Dewey secured seas. The Spanish beaten, the U.S. became the imperial masters of the islandsa]an uncharacteristic move from those commonly seen as the beacon of democracy. But the Filipinos rejected that authority, thus the Spanish-American War became the Philippine-American War. We have had three specific periods in our history which are eerily similarathe Philippine-American War, the Vietnam War, and the Iraq War. To hear those who oppose U.S. authority described as insurgents or insurrectos, echoes appearathe same terms were used for the Filipinos in 1900. Aguinaldo, the first president of the Philippine Republic, first fought with us, then against us, and finally forgave and redeemed us. Magdalo the warrior became Aguinaldo the statesman.

Andres Bonifacio, the leader of the Philippine Revolution of 1896, has become one of the country's great national heroes. He is celebrated in history textbooks read by millions of young Filipinos. His image, cast in bronze and cut into stone, stands on plazas across the archipelago. But what do we really know about him? As succeeding generations of historians have re-created his legend, has the real Bonifacio been lost to us forever? In this carefully researched work, Glenn May sifts through the slender documentary legacy that Bonifacio left behind after his execution in 1897. Through a close reading of these texts, he uncovers a history of mythmaking in the service of nationalism. Our contemporary image of Bonifacio is the sum of unreliable personal testimony and dubious, possibly doctored, documents. If the real history of the Philippine Revolution is to be written, May concludes, historians will have to break through these heroic myths and admit to the limitations of the existing sources. Distributed for the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Revealing glimpses of the Philippine Revolution and the Filipino writer Jose Rizal emerge despite the worst efforts of feuding academics in Apostol’s hilariously erudite novel, which won the Philippine National Book Award. Gina Apostol’s riotous second novel takes the form of a memoir by one Raymundo Mata, a half-blind bookworm and revolutionary, tracing his childhood, his education in Manila, his love affairs, and his discovery of writer and fellow revolutionary, Jose Rizal. Mata’s 19th-century story is complicated by present-day foreword(s), afterword(s), and footnotes from three fiercely quarrelsome and comic voices: a nationalist editor, a neo-Freudian psychoanalyst critic, and a translator, Mimi C. Magsalin. In telling the contested and fragmentary story of Mata, Apostol finds new ways to depict the violence of the Spanish colonial era, and to reimagine the nation’s great writer, Jose Rizal, who was executed by the Spanish for his revolutionary activities, and is considered by many to be the father of Philippine independence. The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata offers an intoxicating blend of fact and fiction, uncovering lost histories while building dazzling, anarchic modes of narrative.

Be careful what you wish for . . . Andi is short. And she has lots of wishes. She wishes she could play on the school basketball team, she wishes for her own bedroom, but most of all she wishes that her long lost half brother, Bernardo, could come and live in London, where he belongs. Then Andi's biggest wish comes true and she's minutes away from becoming someone's little sister. As she waits anxiously for Bernardo to arrive from the Philippines, she hopes he'll turn out to be tall and just as mad as she is about basketball. When he finally arrives, he's tall all right. But he's not just tall ... he's a GIANT. In a novel packed with humour and quirkiness, Gourlay explores a touching sibling relationship and the clash of two very different cultures.