Véhicule Press is taking a chance again: we've just signed a contract for a new book, tentatively called Making Waves: The Portuguese Adventure. Doesn't sound like it has much in common with my recent non-fiction, but, never fear, there is a direct line.As I've traveled around over the last few years, researching my trio of books about nature, cities, and history and my recent fiction, I've been amazed at how frequently I encountered the Portuguese and their descendants. That wasn't a surprise in São Paulo, Brazil, featured in Green City, but in Kochi, India, I visited the church where the great explorer Vasco da Gama was buried after his death in 1524. Then there were the people with Portuguese surnames I met in Tanzania when I went looking for the home of wild African violets for The Violets of Usambara. Long before then, though, I saw Portuguese cod fishermen playing soccer in a parking lot in St. John's, Newfoundland, and even farther back, I remember the local grocery in San Diego, founded by a Portguese family to provision the tuna fleet.
In short the Portuguese were everywhere, and, as I discovered when I began research, they were leaders in other ways too--Lisbon was rebuilt along rational, Haussmannian lines a century before the Baron rejigged Paris, while the Carnation Revolution of the 1970s is a model of how to change a regime peacefully, to name only two.
Now all I have to do is write the book!
Photo: the view across the Tagus River, not far from where it flows into the Atlantic.
