You will never think of Manila the same again...

Manila, City of Islands evokes Manila's rhythms, colors, and sights, capturing the city's totality and uniqueness.

Wise avoids the sententious clcihes of the bad rich and the good poor. There are no heroic guerillas or demonic Americans or redemptive romantic nationalists. Rather, he subtly explains urban behavior as a result of tensions between kinship and strangers, technology and history, and therefore explores in a clear-eyed manner the multiple layers of the private worlds of the poor. The traditional public spaces of both the classical and modernist cities have been almost eviscerated.

With a wry skeptical eye. Wise melds painstaking urban anthropological-ethno-methodological observation, classic urban sociological analysis, and filtered social theorizing into a seamless elegant whole that rarely misses a beat.