BOOK REVIEW: The Making of the Modern Philippines

By Philip Bowring. Bloomsbury Academic, London. Hard cover, with bibliography, maps and index. 256 pp. US$24.95 on Amazon

The Philippines is famously an anomaly, seemingly closer in identity to Latin America than to its littoral neighbors on the South China Sea, as author Philip Bowring notes, ruled at first by the Spanish, who “left a religion, a few genes and some aspects of culture” followed by the Americans, who left their own stamp of imperfect democracy, a free liber…