You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Cosmopolitan Singapore—emblematic of globalised capitalism—usually calls to mind a number of clichés: orderly, clean and green, a shopping and business paradise, and a model of sound economic management. Tourists, journalists and passing businessmen cast an absent-minded glance at the local society, noting that the food is excellent, e-communication works well and armoured tanks are absent on street corners. But after 17 years living here, the author shows a different side of Singapore: looking at her from the grassroots. Beyond his personal atypical story, he draws with light strokes of the brush, a picture of a warm and generous people, much less passive than one is often given to thi...
In Redefining Heresy and Tolerance, Hung Tak Wai examines how the Qing empire governed Muslims and Christians under its rule with a non-interventionist policy. Manchu emperors adopted a tolerant attitude towards Islam and Christianity as long as political stability and loyalty remained unthreatened. However, Hung argues that such tolerance had its limitations. Since the mid-eighteenth century, the Qing court intentionally minimised the importance of the Islamic identity. Restrictions were imposed on the Muslims’ external connections with Western Asia. The Christian minority was kept distant from politics and the Han majority. At the same time, Confucian scholars began to acquire a new unde...
This is the historical memoir of Dr Poh Soo Kai, a medical doctor and a founder member of the People's Action Party. Here he tells the story of his incarceration as a political prisoner under Singapore's notorious Internal Security Act, and the anti-colonial struggle which defined the years after the Second World War. Poh was born in Singapore in 1930. He is the maternal grandson of prominent businessman Tan Kah Kee. After the Japanese surrender in 1945, he continued his studies at Raffles Institution and entered the University of Malaya in 1950. He was a founding member of the Socialist Club in 1953 and became its second President from August that year till the following year. Poh was one o...
None
None
To Jurong with Love analyses a coherent story of young Singaporeans, Catholics and others, from 1960 to 2000, around a remarkable Workers Centre at Jurong, an industrial estate in Singapore. The Review of Life, the method of formation used by the Young Christian Workers Movement inspired hundreds of young men and women to take their painstaking part in building the new society. I doubt there are many comparable pastoral analyses on this scale of church youth leadership in modern society. This record is rare in the way it pursues young people’s own initiatives and perspectives. While numerous groups of young workers form the core of this story, the players include student groups and special...
In a writing workshop at Changi Prison, retired professor JG Chan encounters a story written by inmate Alphonsus Goh. ‘Payoh’ tells the adventures of a sulphur-crested cockatoo named Lucky who finds his way to a protected bird sanctuary. Conflict soon ensues, and the sanctuary birds decide it’s time to gain autonomy from their human-watchers. They must form a small team of leaders to govern their newly independent sanctuary. However, skeptics and detractors also exist within ...
Uncompromising yet accessible, the six sequences in Changes and Chances explore love, sorrow, time, nature, and humanity. By turns passionate, hermetic, and heartbreaking, they simultaneously endure and celebrate all the imperfections of the world. Leonard Ng blends free verse with adaptations of both Western and Asian forms to create a musical poetry grounded in the traditions of both East and West. A purchase of the book comes with a complimentary Changes and Chances postcard (while stocks last)!
Developed as an exploratory study of artworks by artists of Singapore and Malaysia, Retrospective attempts to account for contemporary artworks that engage with history. These are artworks that reference past events or narratives, of the nation and its art. Through the examination of a selection of artworks produced between 1990 and 2012, Retrospective is both an attribution and an analysis of a historiographical aesthetic within contemporary art practice. It considers that, by their method and in their assembly, these artworks perform more than a representation of a historical past. Instead, they confront history and its production, laying bare the nature and designs of the historical proje...