Reviews

By LUZ RIMBAN

FILIPINOS are generally known to have an aversion to reading, and educators often despair at how difficult it is to make students appreciate the printed word. Given a choice between books and films, most Filipinos would opt for the moving image rather than text.

Filmmaker and teacher Nick de Ocampo offers a solution: Why not make students learn from the best Filipino movies?

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By CHIT ESTELLA

IF numbers represented money, wouldn’t more people be interested in them?

The innocuously titled book, “Your Guidebook to Effective and Transparent National Budget Legislation: Philippine Setting,” shows how true this can be. The product of 15 years of observation and research, the book is the work of former accountants and managers who banded themselves to form the Center for National Budget Legislation. It is published by J.A. Ranola Consultancy.

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By CHIT ESTELLA

MANY Filipinos would find it hard to find a Tagalog word for “honest.” Matapat, the oft-cited word, comes closer to the English word “faithful.” Malinis is clean, which could refer to many other things. The debate goes on.

They would find it easy, however, to come up with local equivalents for the word “corrupt.” In the book, “Corruptionary: Natatanging diksyonaryo ng mga salitang korapsyon,” the authors found not one or just a few but 450 words that mean or are related to the word. The origins of the expressions, however, are not government alone but mass media as well. Corrupt practices, after all, abound not just in the bureaucracy and officialdom that journalists like to criticize but in their own industry as well.

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