Mabini's ghost / Ambeth R. Ocampo.

The cause of history writing owes Ambeth Ocampo a great deal. By his extraordinary use of a relatively new genre, he has rescued history from the cold, forbidding halls of academe, populated for so long by highbrow scholars, and dyspeptic textbook writers. He has brought it into the full light of everyday life, into the coffeeshop, the bus stop, and the family reunion. He has made of history something amusing, entertaining, to be passed on like a piece of neighborhood gossip. Through his newspaper columns and articles, the latest of which are collected in the present volume, he has given life to the dry bones of the past. He has given flesh and color to the marble and bronze monuments to which the ponderous adulation of analysts and politicians had condemned our heroes. Ocampo has managed to turn their lives into something as immediate as newspaper headline, as relevant as rapper's song.