Jose ‘Pepe’ Rodriguez’s fifth book: Front Pages of Philippine History

MANILA, Philippines - • Veteran Spanish journalist and writer Jose “Pepe” Rodriguez will launch his fifth book, Front Pages of Philippine History, today at the Writers Bar, Raffles hotel in Makati City. The book is a compilation of selected front pages of Philippine newspapers from the author’s personal archives showing how writers and journalists have reported significant events in the last 200 years of the country’s history. “It is a ‘hard-copy’ of history…not an interpretation,” Rodriguez asserts. “Historians, researchers, and students can make use of (the material) in understanding the transformation of a people and nation-from a colony to a republic, to dictatorship and democratic restoration.”

Rodriguez, a former bureau chief for Asia and the Pacific of the international Spanish news agency EFE and director of the Instituto Cervantes, has married a Filipina and adopted the Philippines as his home.

He is also the author of Cronicas and Philippine First Ladies Portraits.

The book boasts of an introduction by Nobel Prize Winner in Literature, Mario Vargas Llosa, who praises the author’s rigorous investigation of Philippine history that has produced “a book which is instructive, entertaining and full of surprises.”