Lolo Jose: An Intimate and Illustrated Portrait of Jose Rizal traces the vivid life story of the First Filipino as culled from family lore and personal anecdotes. Rizal's grandniece Asuncion Lopez Bantug has written a biography that enables us to see, hear, and feel how an acutely sensitive and prodigiously talented boy became the Philippine national hero in an epoch of great suffering and danger.

The book features the most comprehensive photo album of Rizal, with more than three hundred historical photos and reproductions, along with the complete bibliography of his visual, literary, and political works. Also included are an illustrated chronology of his life and the family's remarkable genealogical chart which traces their Chinese ancestry back to the early seventeenth century and springs forward to six generations of descendants.

The hardcover edition is accompanied by the CD-ROM Codex Rizal, which contains the full text of Rizal's novels and selected works, landmark biographies by Wenceslao Retana (Vida y Escritos del Dr. Jose Rizal), Austin Craig (Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal), and Rafael Palma (Biografia de Rizal), Teodoro Kalaw's pioneering Epistolario Rizalino (the scholarly compilation of Rizal's correspondence in Spanish), and a gallery of over two hundred photographs and illustrations. Codex Rizal is linked to Filipiniana.net's The Complete Jose Rizal, the most extensive online repository of Rizal's monumental cultural output.