Word: manila
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...second novel, Ong comes home. The Disinherited is a morality tale set in Manila in 2000, moving throughout Philippine society, from ?lite private sports clubs to pestilential slums. Roger Caracera is the youngest son of a sugar magnate, who has come of age in California and now lives in New York City, where he teaches writing at Columbia University. The novel begins as he returns to the Philippines to bury his estranged father: in a scene straight out of a Victorian potboiler, the will is read in the posh attorney's offices, and Caracera learns that his father has bequeathed...
...Blueboy, who at once dazzles his patrons and suffers humiliation at their hands, is clearly a symbol of the Philippines, simultaneously naive and calculating, seductive and repellent; but here Ong veers into the outer reaches of bad taste. The boy's first scene, at a sex club in a Manila slum, is disgusting in the extreme, even as it strains credulity...
...expected to rise to a hundred and ten before day's end." This steep a rise in the course of an afternoon is all but impossible, as anyone with a passing familiarity with the region's weather knows; anyway, it never gets that hot in Manila, not even close. It might seem a small point, but a book that seeks to speak with authority about the Philippines unnecessarily handicaps itself with a sloppy factual error in the first paragraph...
...Administration--Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange among them--whose pictures would become our collective memory of the Depression. From them, he learned the moral dimension of photography and its power to turn life into theater. During World War II, he and his wife were captured by the Japanese in Manila and spent nearly two years in prison camps. But he was released in time to take his famous shot of General Douglas MacArthur sloshing onto a beach in Luzon in the Philippines--a picture of victory as both moral triumph and the ultimate photo opportunity...
...Sayyaf uses. "They are setting up an urban assassination squad called Fisabillilah, or 'The Path of God,'" says Kit Colliers of the Australian National University in Canberra, who has written a detailed report on Islamic militancy and terrorism in the Philippines for the International Crisis Group. Security officials in Manila say half a dozen alleged Abu Sayyaf operatives arrested in June for possession of materials for explosives were members of the squad. "Thank God we got them before the President's inauguration," says outgoing Defense Secretary Eduardo Ermita, referring to Arroyo's swearing in on June...