ABOUT THE BOOK

Bamboo Bed chronicles McCarty’s life in the immediate pre-Marcos and Martial Law eras as he moved in and out of the country’s jails—at one point sharing the same prison cell as the historian William Henry Scott—while circulating among an impressive circle of Manila’s gangsters, artists, ex-rebels, bohemians, drug addicts, politicians, and assorted cognoscenti. Bamboo Bed is … a rare document by a postcolonial American who has moved between the centers and margins of power. In this account of the tempestuous antecedents of late twentieth-century Manila, Mac gives us no less than a visceral map of the modern Philippines that is at once hallucinatory and prophetic.—Vicente L. Rafael, Univ. of Washington, Seattle

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Weldon “Mac” McCarty is a musician and author, and presently lives and writes in Quezon City.