Books on Martial Law and the Marcos Years

Here are several extensively-researched literature to aid you in learning about one of the darkest periods in Philippine history.

1. The Philippine Economy: Development, Policies, and Challenges

edited by Arsenio Balisacan and Hal Hill

Category: Business and Economics

Co-published with the Oxford University Press, this book is comprehensive, authoritatively written, and highly relevant for policy-makers. It provides a clearer understanding of the need for policies and reforms that meet the challenges of development. This is a superb volume, with many first-rate contributions led by two of the region's leading economists, Arsenio Balisacan and Hal Hill, that no serious student or policymaker can afford to ignore.

Retail price is PHP 575. Available on our website and Lazada store. Limited stocks only.

2. Living and Dying: In Memory of 11 Ateneo de Manila Martial Law Activists

by Cristina Jayme Montiel

Category: Biography

Memorializes the eleven young Ateneans: Ferdie Arceo, Bill Begg, Jun Celestial, Sonny Hizon, Edjop Jopson, Eman Lacaba, Dante Perez, Ditto Sarmiento, Lazzie Silva, Nick Solana, Manny Yap, who gave their lives for their convictions during the horrendous ten years of martial law.

Retail price is PHP 300. Only the eBook version is available on our website and Lazada store.

3. Ascending the Fourth Mountain: A Personal Account of the Marcos Years

by Maria Virginia Yap Morales

Category: Autobiography

In Ascending the Fourth Mountain, Maria Virginia Yap Morales tells her story of the martial law years and of the widespread participation of women against violations of human rights and sexual abuse under military detention. This book is the story of a woman who struggled for equality within a revolutionary movement and fully participated to draft the orientation of the Malayang Kilusan ng Bagong Kababaihan (MAKIBAKA) which had its origins in the years before martial rule. More than that, this book is the author’s inner journey to discover and study herself, and to eventually see through the mote in her own eye that blurs a fourth mountain looming large, blocking her vision of political and social transformation.

Retail price is PHP 370. Available on our website, Lazada and Shopee stores.

4. Musika at Bagong Lipunan: Pagbuo ng Lipunang Filipino, 1972-1986

by Raul C. Navarro

Category: Arts, Culture, and Music

Bagama’t dalawampu’t limang taon na ang nakalipas buhat nang pagkatatag ng batas military at ang pagkabuwag nito sa pamamagitan ng rebolusyon ng People Power, sa dami ng mga sulatin at aklat na lumabas at nailimbag ay wala pang tumuon sa paksa ng musika na siyang umiral sa kabuuan ng rehimeng nagtaguyod dito bilang isang malakas na puwersa sa pagbabago ng kamalayan at pagpapahalaga. Totoong napapanahon na, na ang ganitong talakayin at pag-aaral ay maisulat upang mabuo pa nang kaunti ang malaking larawan, kung saan maraming aral ang matututuhan ng buong bansa at marami ring sulok ng katotohanan ang mararating ng ating kaalaman….

Ang pagtatangkang ito na mailuklok ang musika sa tamang lugar nito sa mga pangyayaring naganap sa rehimen ni Marcos ay isang pambihirang gawa na maaaring makapag-udyok ng iba pang pag-aaral sa iba pang aspeto ng mga karanasang dinanas noong mga panahong iyon. Ang pag-aaral na ito, katangitangi sapagkat tinukoy nito ang isang mahalagang bahagi ng kulturang Pilipino, kahit na marami pang palaisipang mauukilkil at mailalagay sa iba’t ibang perspektiba at kaayusan. —Ramon Pagayon Santos, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus, College of Music, University of the Philippines.

Retail price is PHP 320. Only the eBook version is available on our website and Lazada store.

5. Edifice Complex: Power, Myth, and Marcos State Architecture

by Gerard Lico

Category: Architecture

Finalist, 2002 National Book Award for Best Book of Art

“Gerard Lico’s contribution to Philippine architectural history and criticism covers the late twentieth-century phenomenon of a distinctive, but slightly demented, architectural aesthetic wielded by a ‘conjugal dictatorship’ to legitimize its regime and perpetuate its power. It is this relationship between power and architecture that provides the framework and context for this book.”—Paulo Alcazaren.

Retail price is PHP 370. Available on our Lazada and Shopee stores. Limited stocks only.

6. Down from the Hill: Ateneo de Manila in the First Ten Years Under Martial Law, 1972-1982

edited by Cristina Jayme Montiel and Susan Evangelista

Category: History

The first book on the Ateneo de Manila during martial law, Down from the Hill relives memories of the university from 1972 to 1982 and sheds light on what used to be whispered stories of campus subversion and student arrests. This book contains vignettes from former students, faculty, administrators, professionals, and Jesuits and has an appendix of relevant documents that are often difficult to access.

Retail price is PHP 460. Available on our Lazada store. Limited stocks only.

7. A Capital City at the Margins: Quezon City and Urbanization in the Twentieth-Century Philippines

by Michael D. Pante

Category: History

Finalist, 2022 National Book Award for Social Science

Quezon City served as the Philippines’s capital for almost three decades (1948–1976), yet Filipinos today barely remember this historical fact. Was the city, therefore, a failure? This book answers this question by presenting an unconventional historical geography of twentieth-century Quezon City, one that focuses not on its grandiose architecture and master plan but on its boundaries, peripheries, and marginal areas. In so doing, it shows how the city functioned as a buffer zone mediating between city and countryside, and thus developed due to the urban–rural overlaps inherent in sociohistorical forces such as colonialism, revolution, agrarian unrest, decolonization, migration, and authoritarianism. Not quite Manila-centric, this book is twentieth-century Philippine history from an off-center point of view

Retail price is PHP 485. Available on our website, Lazada and Shopee stores.

8. In the Name of Civil Society: From Free Election Movements to People Power in the Philippines

by Eva-Lotta E. Hedman

Category: Politics & Society

Finalist, 2006 National Book Award for Social Science

Examines Philippine politics in a highly original and provocative way. Hedman’s detailed analysis shows how dominant elites in the Philippines shore up the structures of liberal democracy in order to ensure their continued hegemony over Philippine society.

Retail price is PHP 440. Available on our Lazada store.

9. Some Are Smarter than Others: The History of Marcos’ Crony Capitalism

by Ricardo Manapat

Category: Politics & Society

Some Are Smarter Than Others irrefutably exposed the political and economic infrastructure of plunder supporting the Marcos dictatorship. Yet these are now denied and the unrepentant Marcoses in their manipulation of current politics have led the country again to Martial Law (in Mindanao) and to appalling impunity.

Ric Manapat exercised not only intellectual passion in research but always raged at the poverty caused by government-sponsored greed, witnessing its effects on particular persons–urban poor and farmers who were his deep and life-long friends. In producing this book and other projects, he would have been guided by Thesis 11: the point of understanding the world being to change it. –Karen Tañada

Retail price is PHP 790. Available on our Lazada and Shopee stores.

10. The Conjugal Dictatorship of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos

by Primitivo Mijares

Category: Politics & Society

This book reports on the best-laid plans that paved the way for the Philippines’ dark history: the imposition of martial law in 1972 and the schemes that built and held its infrastructure. Drawing data from his work as Marcos’s media adviser before his defection in 1975, Primitivo Mijares exposes the massive corruption and military abuses under the regime, which has left the nation in ruins. Forty years after its first publication, the book, in this revised and annotated edition, reminds Filipinos of their past that remains a present threat.

Retail price is PHP 650. Available on our website, Lazada and Shopee stores.

11. Philippine Politics and the Marcos Technocrats: The Emergence and Evolution of a Power Elite

by Teresa S. Tadem

Category: Politics & Society

This book traces the rise of technocrats who were part of President Marcos’s pre-martial law administration (1965–1972) and who segued into the martial law regime. It looks into their family and educational backgrounds and how these have shaped and developed the technocratic know-how which made them valuable to local businesses and multinational corporations in the 1950s to the 1960s. The book shows that precisely on matters of economic policy-making, there was that precarious dynamics between the technocrats on one hand, and a pre-martial law Congress and the business community on the other, both dominated by family economic interests. The book thus hopes to add to the scant existing literature that illustrates how power elites like technocrats transform into important players in policy-making.

Retail price is PHP 480. Only its eBook is currently available on our website and Lazada store. The print copies will be available soon. 

12. Moral Politics in the Philippines: Inequality, Democracy, and the Urban Poor

by Wataru Kusaka

Category: Politics & Society

“The people” famously ousted Ferdinand Marcos from power in the Philippines in 1986. After democratization, though, a fault line appeared that split the people into citizens and the masses. The former were members of the middle class who engaged in civic action against the restored elite-dominated democracy, and viewed themselves as moral citizens in contrast with the masses, who were poor, engaged in illicit activities and backed flawed leaders. The masses supported emerging populist counter-elites who promised to combat inequality, and saw themselves as morally upright in contrast to the arrogant and oppres-sive actions of the wealthy in arrogating resources to themselves. 

In 2001, the middle class toppled the populist president Joseph Estrada through an extra-constitutional movement that the masses denounced as illegitimate. Fearing a populist uprising, the middle class supported action against informal settlements and street vendors, and violent clashes erupted between state forces and the poor. Although solidarity of the people re-emerged in opposition to the corrupt presidency of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and propelled Benigno Aquino III to victory in 2010, inequality and elite rule continue to bedevil Philippine society. Each group considers the other as a threat to democracy, and the prevailing moral antagonism makes it difficult to overcome structural causes of inequality.

Retail price is PHP 400. Only its eBook is currently available on our website, Lazada and Shopee stores.

13. Canal de la Reina: Isang Nobela

by Liwayway A. Arceo

Category: Literature

Ang nobela ito, na sosyo-ekonomiko, ay naglalarawan ng kaligaligan at pagbabalisa ng mga karaniwang tao sa Maynila bago nagkaroon ng Batas Militar. Nakatuon ang kasaysayan sa nagdarahop na mamayan sa gilid ng Canal de la Reina. Isinalin ito sa Japanese ni Motoe Terami Wada, propesor sa kasaysayan, at inilunsad ng Dan-dansha sa Tokyo, Japan (1990). —Asian Pacific Book Development Quarterly, Japan, 1991

Mayaman sa paglalarawan at simbolismo ang nobela. Ang baha ay naging tagadalisay ng kaluluwa at ng natutuyong pamayanan: ito ang simula ng bagong pag-asa at bagong simula. Kapansin-pansin ang likas na kakayahan ni Arceo sa paghahayag na nagawang magsalita ang mga tauhan sa pang-arawaraw na wika, kung hindi ay nanatili sanang tila kahoy ang mga iyon. Minsan pa, napatunayan ang pagiging dalubhasa ng awtor sa kanyang sining. —Paz Buenaventura Naylor, Unibersidad ng Michigan, USA, 1988

Retail price is PHP 255. Available on our Lazada and Shopee stores.

14. Canal de la Reina: English Translation

by Liwayway Arceo and translated by Soledad S. Reyes

Category: Literature

Canal de la Reina was Liwayway Arceo’s response to the call for committed writing as an aftermath of the violent head-on collisions of diverse forces in the 1970s. Arceo had not been known for engaged or “political” writing, where the writer deployed their craft to project a vision of a world in turmoil, where characters were fully engaged in the bloody struggle to effect a radical change in society. This willful commitment to using literature to paint a canvas of a world in turmoil had been demonstrated by a long line of Filipino writers, from Jose Rizal to the generation of Lope K. Santos and Servando de los Angeles in the first half of the 20th century, to the generation of Rogelio Sicat and Ricky Lee in the post-war decades. This is a legacy that has pushed various writers to confront the burning issues of the day.

Retail price is PHP 400. Available on our website, Lazada and Shopee stores.

15. Kung Wala na ang Tag-araw /Ano Ngayon, Ricky?

by Rosario de Guzman-Lingat

Category: Literature

Two novels by Rosario de Guzman-Lingat. Kung Wala na ang Tag-araw tells of one man’s quest for passionate love contextualized in the turbulence of the prewar and postwar Philippines. Ano Ngayon, Ricky? focuses on the character Ricky’s initiation into the political activism of the 1970s.

Retail price is PHP 390. Available on our website, Lazada and Shopee stores.

16. Two Women as Specters of History: Lakambini and Indigo Child

by Rody Vera

Edited with production notes & interview by Ellen Ongkeko-Marfil introduction by Joel David

Category: Literature

Winner, 2022 National Book Award for Best Book of Drama

Vera cultivated the serendipitous vision regarding Gregoria de Jesus, widow of the first would-have-been President Andres Bonifacio, as the body on whom the betrayals and shortcomings of the foreign invader, local elite, and well-intentioned revolutionary would be inscribed. With the return to popularity of the surviving members of Marcos’s family, premised on the wager that the present generation would be ignorant or dismissive of the strongman’s monstrosities, Vera responded to an invitation to provide a play that turned on the traumatic experience of a left-revolutionary activist, the late-twentieth-century counterpart of de Jesus. . . .

With the present volume, the earnest student of communication should be sufficiently motivated to read through the material as written (and answered, in the interview) by Vera and arranged by the publisher. Also indispensable would be a viewing of Indigo Child, the soon-to-be-completed documentary on Lakambini, and (if our luck holds out) the feature film version of Lakambini itself. A more casual reader could opt to zero in on Indigo Child first, especially if she would have seen the play and/or [Ellen] Ongkeko-Marfil’s filmization. Since none of the entries in this volume . . . is a closed text, such a casual reader would be left with a clutch of unanswered questions. I would imagine that that would motivate [the reader] to proceed to the interview with Vera; but inasmuch as the said interview only provides tantalizing references to the Lakambini script, then our casual reader would wind up reading everything as well, even in an alternate order. —“Theater, Film, & Everything in Between,” Joel David

Retail price is PHP 480. Available on our website, Lazada and Shopee stores.

17. The Betrayed: A Novel

by Reine Arcache Melvin

Category: Literature

Winner, 2018 National Book Award for Best Novel in English

Set in a time of dictatorship and political upheaval, The Betrayed tells the story of two sisters who love the same man. Their passion threatens to lead them to betray not only each other but all that their father stood for. Shy, idealistic Pilar initially resolves to carry on her father’s fight against the dictator, while her flamboyant older sister Lali reacts by marrying the enemy—Arturo, the dictator’s godson. Each tries to find their place in this violent world, but can they withstand the corruption of politics and the relentless pull of their own desires? What price must one pay for passion?

Retail price is PHP 450. Available on our website, Lazada and Shopee stores.

18. The Collaborators: A Novel

by Katrina Tuvera

Category: Literature

As the 20th century draws to a close, the nation is glued to the impeachment trial of its president. Carlos Armando lies on his deathbed, dwelling on memories of his childhood during the war through to the martial law era and its aftermath. Deeply observant and sharp-witted, The Collaborators examines various instances of collaboration and complicity in Philippine history, and is apt to question today’s social contract between people and their leaders, between the ruled and their rulers.

Retail price is PHP 395. Available on our website, Lazada and Shopee stores.

19. The Marcos Era: A Reader

Edited by Leia Castañeda Anastacio and Patricio N. Abinales,

Category: Politics and Society

This book brings into conversation historians, journalists, political scientists, pundits, lawyers, and economists across generations as they engage in a collective assessment of Ferdinand E. Marcos Sr.'s regime. Extensive as well as incisive, the essays in this unprecedented anthology appraise different facets of this seminal period's policies, programs, and personalities and reveal a complicated legacy whose full import and impact have yet to be thoroughly unpacked.

Retail price is PHP 695. Available on our website, or Lazada and Shopee stores.

20. Martial Law in the Philippines

Edited by Edilberto de Jesus and Ivyrose Baysic

Category: Politics and Society

Edited by Edilberto C. De Jesus and Ivyrose S. Baysic, Martial Law in the Philippines is composed of essays revisiting the martial law regime imposed by Ferdinand Marcos Sr. fifty years ago. This book provides information and analyses of its legacy of complex and contentious issues that still require resolution.

Retail price is PHP 795. Available on our website, or Lazada and Shopee stores

Read, understand, and never forget.