Looking for the Philippines : travel essays / by Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo.

In this, her latest book, CRISTINA PANTOJA HIDALGO, prize-winning fictionist and scholar, revisits the cities she first encountered much earlier in her life. Part travel writing and part memoir, these essays combine observation and reminiscence, with insights drawn from her readings and her conversations with people for whom these cities are home. Hidalgo, whose travel essays first appeared in Manila periodicals in 1980, and now has published seven collections of such pieces, says of this book : "Perhaps I write about places as a way of making sense of the spaces I occupy now, these islands, which are and are not one country." Describing her earlier books, critic Jonathan Chua wrote : "Hidalgo is at her best describing places, especially those that no longer are or else have been altered irreversibly. As in a pointillist painting, she lays out the details... But these essays are more than sentimental musings about times past ... Hidalgo manages to provoke her readers to rethink the familiar ... We are introduced to a sensibility well-informed, sensitive, and sophisticated, but not unblemished by doubts." And Roel Hoang Manipon : "In the Philippines, travel writing has just emerged as a dynamic litary force and arguably it is largely spurred by essayist and fictionist Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo ... Hidalgo's travel essays owe much to and have the intimate qualities of memoirs, diaries and personal narratives ..."