Book excerpt: This selective history of Portugal reflects the author’s fascination with his own Portuguese/Madeiran heritage. The work tracks the nation’s rise and fall as a world power, drawing from the author’s travels and archival research. “Dos Passos,” writes historian J. H. Plumb, “brings to his material a novelist’s acute eye for human character and a narrative skill that any historian might envy; and he has produced one of the most readable books on the subject that I know.”