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 clichés of the bad rich and the good poor. There are no heroic guerrillas or demonic Americans or redemptive romantic nationalists. Rather, he subtly explains urban behavior as a result of tensions between kinships and strangers, technology and history, and therefore explores in a clear-eyed manner the multiple layers of private cities that comprise Metro Manila, from the gated cities of the rich to the private worlds of the poor. The traditional public spaces of both the classical and modernist city have been almost eviscerated.

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