"There are two journalists living today who are rocklike in their integrity and in their courage. And one is Wilfred Burchett, the Australian journalist you might say is a universal journalist. He''s been everywhere, and often every side calls upon him because he is right there with his information that others lack, because the information is from his own experience and being there." --Studs Terkel "The revolutionary period which began in Portugal on 25 April 1974 is enormously complex. In order to be properly understood, it requires an awareness of the many different interpretations of events taking place in Portugal and its remaining colonies. Melo and Walker have performed a great service to Portuguese historiography - and the study of revolutionary processes - by resurrecting and carefully editing Wilfred Burchett''s writings on the subject. An enthusiastic supporter of the ''Carnation Revolution'', Burchett travelled the length and breadth of Portugal interviewing not only well known political and military leaders, but, more interestingly still, everyday men and women alike. He recorded and preserved their experiences of poverty and repression under Salazar''s New State, their take on the revolutionary events in which they were participating and their hopes for the future.

For this alone the work is worth reading, whatever one''s own views on the events in Portugal and Burchett''s interpretation of them. I can certainly see myself using it with students: it encapsulates brilliantly a certain reading of the ''Carnation Revolution'' and the interviews are invaluable." --Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses, author of Salazar: A Political Biography "Wilfred Burchett was famous for telling the story from the other side: From Nazi Germany, Hiroshima, China, and most famously from Vietnam. When he arrived in Lisbon after the coup d''etat in Lisbon of April 25, 1974, he found that the young military officers, the Armed Forces Movement (MFA), who had made the coup, all knew who he was. The junior officers, who had spent three deployments fighting endless colonial wars in Portuguese Africa, had all read his accounts of the insurgency in Vietnam. They were anxious to speak to him. He was a suburb journalist, an old line "leg man." He listened to them, he recorded their aspirations, their motivations, their struggles, their failures, and their successes.

He left the comfort of the bar at the Tivoli Hotel where most foreign journalists spent their time to visit the Alentejo in the south of Portugal and Trás-as-Montes in the north. The everyday lived experience of the Portuguese revolution shine through in these pages and in the voices of the key participants. Burchett had privileged access to the communists who had suffered the most brutal repression under the Salazar/Caetano regime. They told him their stories. Burchett''s interviews with these victims of the Portuguese dictatorship are the very best and most compelling revelations of the torture, imprisonment, and endless harassment and spying to which they were subjected, as were for almost fifty years the Portuguese people. One in three Portuguese were informers to PIDE, the Portuguese secret police, including priests, who sold information obtained in confessionals, which explains the vast and spontaneous popular reaction and support for the coup which assured its overwhelming instantaneous success. But Burchett also describes the break up of the MFA-People Alliance. The split within the MFA.

This is a compelling account, superbly edited by Daniela Melo and Timothy Walker. Wilfred Burchett was sympathetic to the Armed Forces Movement (MFA) and the communists. (PCP). Yet Daniela Melo provides a nuanced introduction which delves into Burchett''s controversial history. Tariq Ali provides a afterword on the broader context of the Portuguese Revolution. He emphasises the role of the multiple popular power groups which emerged in 1974 and 1975 as the authority of the state collapsed. These were to the left of the Portuguese communists and they regarded these groups as a threat. Tariq Ali does not spare the communist leader Alvaro Cunhal and the PCP from searing criticism.

This is a worthy contribution to the fiftieth anniversary of the uprising in Lisbon that ended five centuries of Portuguese colonialism, led to the ending of white rule in Southern Africa, and began a process of democratisation in Spain and Greece, and eventually in Central and Eastern Europe. Wilfred Burchett was there to capture in marvelous and unique detail this world historical event." --Kenneth Maxwell, author of The Making of Portuguese Democracy "A cogent and astute portrait a revolution that shaped the beginning of third wave of democratization: the Portuguese Revolution of 1974, written by the "rebel" Australian journalist and activist Wilfred Burchett. Published for the first time in English, this carefully edited book offers a vivid portrait of the breakdown of one of the longest rightwing European dictatorships and of its colonial empire." --António Costa Pinto, author of Latin American Dictatorships in the Era of Fascism "In 1974-75 Portugal was a pivotal crossroads for decolonisation, the Cold War and popular revolution. Walker and Melo have brought to light an invaluable first-hand account by one of the period''s leading engagé reporters. Burchett''s journalistic eye brings to life the hopes and fears of the people he meets - activists, farmers, soldiers and fishermen - and with them the experience of the Revolution itself." --Pedro Ramos Pinto, author of Lisbon Rising: Urban Social Movements in the Portuguese Revolution, 1974-1975.