
Noli Me Tangere (Touch Me Not)
1887 · 444 pages
Ibarra returns from Europe to build a school and finds the friars who destroyed his father waiting. Spain banned the book, Filipinos smuggled it in anyway, and Rizal faced a firing squad.
★ 6.5

Ibarra returns from Europe to build a school and finds the friars who destroyed his father waiting. Spain banned the book, Filipinos smuggled it in anyway, and Rizal faced a firing squad.

Guha carries India from independence in 1947 to the present and asks why it never broke apart, given partition, famine and insurgency. He calls it an unnatural nation and an unlikely democracy.

Nations are imagined communities, Anderson argues, assembled by print: strangers reading the same newspapers and novels came to feel like one people. He gave the study of nationalism its vocabulary.