Blighted By Frank Chavez Will Be Released On Oct.October 26, 2009

What They say about the Book


This is a riveting account of the Filipino nation’s dysfunctional institutions. Frank Chavez draws from his long experience as a trial lawyer and former Solicitor General to produce a compelling portrait of decadence in our time. In measured prose, he weaves strands of real events into the filter of satirical fiction. The composite corrupt characters he depicts are all recognizable. We can smell their rot on every page. But heroes come forward when we least expect them. And so, rather than endorse an attitude of knowing cynicism, the author ends his story on a note of sheer faith in new beginnings: This blighted nation can be made whole again.

—Randy David
Professor of Sociology, University of the Philippines


Like one of his characters, described as “Iron Man, Superman and Batman packaged into one,” Frank Chavez is legal eagle, social gadfly, and now newbie litterateur rolled into one. His first novel is a literary cocktail of documentary realism, investigative journalism, political satire, activist teach-in, law-school lecture, travelogue trivia, historical tidbits, and courtroom drama, mixing memory and desire, desperation and dreams. It is at the same time (if one may be allowed to mix metaphors) an indictment penned by a justice leaguer contemplating a landscape perpetually blighted by corruption and injustice.

* Pete Lacaba
Writer, editor, poet, screenwriter, journalist and translator


It is at a blighted hotel that we are introduced to the book’s first blighted characters, a judge and a lawyer who transact their corrupt deal in the toilet. The author Frank Chavez sure gets right to where the dirt is. And he digs up dirt again and again to chronicle the pervasive culture of corruption in all departments of the national and local governments, the corporate world down to the grassroots and the family.
Chavez minces no words to denounce scandal after scandal under the Arroyo administration. This is a monumental reference book for a detailed summary of alleged massive corruption under the present dispensation.
Only in the Philippines !
Using story-telling tools and Socratic, didactic devices, the narrative is as timely as today’s headlines and as timeless as the values of clean, disciplined honest government for, by and of the people.

—Letty Jimenez Magsanoc
Editor-in-Chief, Philippine Daily Inquirer


The stench of squalor rises to high heavens as deceit, abuses, pathos and helplessness grip and strangulate the protagonists as they struggle with the demons of grinding poverty and ostentatious wealth, drug abuse and abusive jail wardens, injustice that rankles and corruption that demoralizes.
Former Solicitor General Frank Chavez has written a searing social commentary that recalls the Ibarra and Elias of Jose Rizal, except that the setting is no longer 1887, but the still cancer-ridden Philippines of 2009.
Here is the Philippines, flawed and blighted, as we perceive it now, but still the Philippines that we must learn to love and make a better place, because it is the only country that we have. Legal Eagle Chavez has carved a name for himself in our literary world.

—Antonio C. Abaya
Columnist, Manila Standard Today


Frank Chavez has assumed another role -- from that of fiery trial lawyer defending journalists beleaguered with libel suits during the martial law years, to that of controversial Solicitor General, and then, to sensitive novelist. In Blighted, he makes his searing commentary on the present state of affairs in his hapless country that he loves so well, damning corruption and abuse of the poor by the rich and powerful, law enforcers, and members of the judicial courts. It is a travelogue, courtroom drama, a series of lectures on the political-social condition and on convoluted minds and temperaments rolled into one. The novel does not bank on sexual undertones but on harsh realities to draw readers’ attention. That Frank Chavez would turn to the novel as his genre for truth-telling makes us the better for it.

* Domini M. Torrevillas
Columnist,The Philippine STAR


The course of a country’s history is determined by its people’s adherence to or disregard of law and morality.
In this novel, the author comes up with a comprehensive compendium of corruption and scandals under the present dispensation that have inflicted both law and morality a serious and almost irreparable beating. He, however, upends the eight-year darkness with a flicker of hope borne by the dawning of a new, redemptive generation.
Frank Chavez proves that the practice of law, after all, is a harmonious confluence of both literature and philosophy.

—Jose C. Laureta
Professor of Law, University of the Philippines

For more information visit... Frank Chavez - | CMA-Law.net