Tag Archives: politics

In My Hands Today…

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Tall Order: The Goh Chok Tong Story Volume 1 – Shing Huei Peh

Goh Chok Tong was an improbable Prime Minister for an unlikely country. He had neither the connections nor the cunning to rise to the top, and was even once famously derided by his mentor Lee Kuan Yew for being ‘wooden’ in his communication skills. Except for an imposing height most unusual in this part of the world, he was an ordinary man.

He lost his father at a young age, lived in a two-bedroom public flat with his mother and four siblings and needed a government bursary to complete university.Yet somehow he succeeded.

Tall Order tells the extraordinary story of his life and career over half a century, revealing how Singapore’s second Prime Minister rose through a combination of strength, wit and a political nous which many, including himself, did not know he had.

In this first of two volumes, Goh navigated years of a challenging apprenticeship to Lee, scoring numerous policy successes but also suffering political blows and humiliation. He was the man who first made Neptune Orient Lines, Singapore’s national carrier, profitable, before entering politics. The stellar corporate stint was followed by his many novel policies and institutions that have since become household names in the Medisave, Total Defence, Residents’ Committee and Nominated Member of Parliament. But the highlights were counterposed by setbacks, including overseeing the People’s Action Party’s first electoral defeat after independence at the Anson by-election.

In the hands of acclaimed author and journalist Peh Shing Huei, this authorised biography reveals the private deliberations and negotiations between Goh and Lee before the maiden leadership transfer of independent Singapore. Tall Order is the first biography of Goh. This riveting book offers rare insights into Singapore’s biggest and most important political and economic stories. .

In My Hands Today…

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Can Singapore Survive? – Kishore Mahbubani

This book poses the question that Singaporeans must wrestle with: can we survive as an independent city-state? Kishore Mahbubani believes that Singaporeans must always ask the question because constant reflection and self-examination should be a part of the core DNA of all Singaporeans. His goal in this book is to create and enhance this culture of reflection among all Singaporeans.

He gives three answers in this book: Yes, No & Maybe.

With these three answers, he attempts to sketch three different scenarios for Singapore’s future. There is logic behind this, as we cannot predict the future. We can, however, prepare for the future by telling stories about what the future could be like.

Besides his substantive Introduction, this book offers some of Kishore’s best essays on Singapore, taken from his Think-Tank and Opinion columns in The Straits Times, as well as contributions to Guardian News, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Davos World Economic Forum’s Forum News Daily, and the “Innovations for Successful Societies” Oral History Project of Princeton University.

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Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs – Camilla Townsend

In November 1519, Hernando Cortés walked along a causeway leading to the capital of the Aztec kingdom and came face to face with Moctezuma. That story—and the story of what happened afterwards—has been told many times, but always following the narrative offered by the Spaniards. After all, we have been taught, it was the Europeans who held the pens. But the Native Americans were intrigued by the Roman alphabet and, unbeknownst to the newcomers, they used it to write detailed histories in their own language of Nahuatl. Until recently, these sources remained obscure, only partially translated, and rarely consulted by scholars.

For the first time, in Fifth Sun, the history of the Aztecs is offered in all its complexity based solely on the texts written by the indigenous people themselves. Camilla Townsend presents an accessible and humanized depiction of these native Mexicans, rather than seeing them as the exotic, bloody figures of European stereotypes. The conquest, in this work, is neither an apocalyptic moment, nor an origin story launching Mexicans into existence. The Mexica people had a history of their own long before the Europeans arrived and did not simply capitulate to Spanish culture and colonization. Instead, they realigned their political allegiances, accommodated new obligations, adopted new technologies, and endured.

This engaging revisionist history of the Aztecs, told through their own words, explores the experience of a once-powerful people facing the trauma of conquest and finding ways to survive, offering an empathetic interpretation for experts and non-specialists alike.

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Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy – Henry Kissinger

Henry Kissinger analyses how six extraordinary leaders he has known have shaped their countries and the world. ‘Leaders,’ writes Henry Kissinger in this compelling book, ‘think and act at the intersection of two the first, between the past and the future; the second between the abiding values and aspirations of those they lead.

They must balance what they know, which is necessarily drawn from the past, with what they intuit about the future, which is inherently conjectural and uncertain. It is this intuitive grasp of direction that enables leaders to set objectives and lay down a strategy. ‘In Leadership, Kissinger analyses the lives of six extraordinary leaders through the distinctive strategies of statecraft which he believes they embodied.

After the Second World War, Konrad Adenauer brought defeated and morally bankrupt Germany back into the community of nations by what Kissinger calls ‘the strategy of humility’. Charles de Gaulle set France beside the victorious Allies and renewed its historic grandeur by ‘the strategy of will’. During the Cold War, Richard Nixon gave geostrategic advantage to the United States by ‘the strategy of equilibrium’.

After twenty-five years of conflict, Anwar Sadat brought a vision of peace to the Middle East by a ‘strategy of transcendence’. Against the odds, Lee Kwan Yew created a powerhouse city-state, Singapore, by ‘the strategy of excellence’. Although when she came to power Britain was known as ‘the sick man of Europe’, Margaret Thatcher renewed her country’s morale and international position by ‘the strategy of conviction’.

To each of these studies, Kissinger brings historical perception, public experience and – because he knew each of their subjects, and participated in many of the events he describes – personal knowledge. The book is enriched by insights and judgements such as only he could make, and concludes with his reflections on world order and the indispensability of leadership today.

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Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis – J.D. Vance

Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans. The disintegration of this group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for more than forty years, has been reported with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck.

The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.’s grandparents were “dirt poor and in love,” and moved north from Kentucky’s Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually one of their grandchildren would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that J.D.’s grandparents, aunt, uncle, and, most of all, his mother struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, never fully escaping the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. With piercing honesty, Vance shows how he himself still carries around the demons of his chaotic family history.