The present volume has resulted from a conference held at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles in 1998. Like the conference, the book is a collaborative effort of many participants brought together by Edmundo F. Litton, a faculty member of Loyola Marymount University, and Cecilia Manguerra Brainard, a respected author, writing teacher, and proponent of Filipino American literary activities. What comes through all seventeen of the "reflections" in this volume is their intensely personal character. In the first essay, for example, Brainard offers a sustained meditation on Enrique, Magellan's Sumatran slave, who became the first person to circumnaviate the globe. Enrique comes alive for Brainard because "he spoke the same language as the people of Cebu," where Brainard herself was born, thus becoming her "kababayan," [countryman], she comments exultingly (5). Drawing from extant written sources, Brainard re-reads the history of the voyage from the contrary perspectives of the natives.