The Philippines Is Not A Small Country
Paperback:
$40.00
ISBN-13: 9789715509930
Published: September 2020
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- About the Book
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This book is an exploration of the Philippines as a beautiful land, a home to a diversity of peoples, a nation-in-the-making, and a country at the heart of the world. Drawing from anthropology, history, contemporary events, popular culture, and the author’s field experiences and travels, the essays draw connections between nature and culture, self and society, the local and the global, as well as the past and the present in order to arrive at a deeper, fuller, critical, yet hopeful view of a country that is larger than many imagine it to be.
- About the Author(s)
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Gideon Lasco, Author
Gideon Lasco is a physician, medical anthropologist, writer, and mountaineer. He obtained his MD from the University of the Philippines and his PhD from the University of Amsterdam. He is currently a senior lecturer at University of the Philippines Diliman's Department of Anthropology and a research fellow at the Ateneo de Manila University's Development Studies Program. A Palanca-winning essayist, he maintains a weekly column in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, where he writes about health, culture, politics, and society.
- Reviews and Endorsements
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- Nick Joaquin had written on our supposed 'heritage of smallness,; and this book certainly does not inherit that. Lasco, like all worthy essayists, writes and thinks in the National, in bold cinemascope or pure iMax. At a time when young writers try to carve epics out of the trivial under the guise of hauteur irony, he is unafraid to discourse on the grand, and consistently manages to shed fresh erudition on seemingly overanalyzed, cliched social issues sans the preachiness. He takes on the big boys: patriotism, history, the environment, politics, human rights, etc. but even for fripperies like fanatical basketball fans, our dietary sugar intake, the tambay, the selfie, Facebook, Pokémon Go—the ambition of these essays is anything but Lilliputian. The Philippines is not a small country. Gideon Lasco, columnist, MD, PhD, (he has more degrees than a thermometer, to use an old joke) knows whereof he speaks: aside from being a medical anthropologist, he is also an obsessive mountaineer who to my knowledge has scaled more mountains in the Philippines than anyone else. See? For some reason, it’s the writing doctors who see the bigger picture. Always the damn doctors.
—Lourd De Veyra
- Nick Joaquin had written on our supposed 'heritage of smallness,; and this book certainly does not inherit that. Lasco, like all worthy essayists, writes and thinks in the National, in bold cinemascope or pure iMax. At a time when young writers try to carve epics out of the trivial under the guise of hauteur irony, he is unafraid to discourse on the grand, and consistently manages to shed fresh erudition on seemingly overanalyzed, cliched social issues sans the preachiness. He takes on the big boys: patriotism, history, the environment, politics, human rights, etc. but even for fripperies like fanatical basketball fans, our dietary sugar intake, the tambay, the selfie, Facebook, Pokémon Go—the ambition of these essays is anything but Lilliputian. The Philippines is not a small country. Gideon Lasco, columnist, MD, PhD, (he has more degrees than a thermometer, to use an old joke) knows whereof he speaks: aside from being a medical anthropologist, he is also an obsessive mountaineer who to my knowledge has scaled more mountains in the Philippines than anyone else. See? For some reason, it’s the writing doctors who see the bigger picture. Always the damn doctors.
