An intimate view of Singapore’s stunning rise since independence.
A frank career assessment by the longtime Singaporean diplomat whose tenure paralleled the decades of Lee Kuan Yew’s stewardship of the country into the international arena.
A descendant of Hindu Sindhi people who left what became Pakistan during Partition, Mahbubani (b. 1948), author of The Great Convergence, was born in Singapore, where his father worked as a laborer. Often drunk and mired in gambling debts, his father was not a stable provider, and the author, his mother, and his sisters struggled to make ends meet. At the same time, they lived amicably among Malay, Chinese, and Muslim neighbors, as Singapore was an entrepreneurial hub fighting for independence from Great Britain and then from the Federation of Malaysia. As the strong-armed Lee Kuan Yew steered the tiny state toward modernization and greater prosperity, Mahbubani “became convinced that the only way for me to progress was to steadily shed my primitive Asian prejudices and replace them with the advanced thought of Western civilization.” In 1967, he writes, “one of the greatest miracles of my life happened.” He was granted a President’s Scholarship to attend the University of Singapore. Although Mahbubani hoped to become a philosophy professor (“Plutarch was right—education isn’t about filling a bucket; it’s about lighting fires”), he joined the Foreign Ministry largely to support his mother, and he served for more than three decades. The author writes about his admiration of Lee, who was close to Ronald Reagan, as well as the importance of Singapore’s election to the UN Security Council in 2001. Mahbubani credits Lee with being able to stand up to the U.S., like David to Goliath, and the author went on to serve as dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. He is a straightforward, prolific, influential commenter on Southeast Asia.
An intimate view of Singapore’s stunning rise since independence.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9781541703049
Page Count: 336
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Deliberately provocative, with much for left-inclined activists to ponder.
A wide-ranging critique of leftist politics as not being left enough.
Continuing his examination of progressive reform movements begun with The Cult of Smart, Marxist analyst deBoer takes on a left wing that, like all political movements, is subject to “the inertia of established systems.” The great moment for the left, he suggests, ought to have been the summer of 2020, when the murder of George Floyd and the accumulated crimes of Donald Trump should have led to more than a minor upheaval. In Minneapolis, he writes, first came the call from the city council to abolish the police, then make reforms, then cut the budget; the grace note was “an increase in funding to the very department it had recently set about to dissolve.” What happened? The author answers with the observation that it is largely those who can afford it who populate the ranks of the progressive movement, and they find other things to do after a while, even as those who stand to benefit most from progressive reform “lack the cultural capital and economic stability to have a presence in our national media and politics.” The resulting “elite capture” explains why the Democratic Party is so ineffectual in truly representing minority and working-class constituents. Dispirited, deBoer writes, “no great American revolution is coming in the early twenty-first century.” Accommodation to gradualism was once counted heresy among doctrinaire Marxists, but deBoer holds that it’s likely the only truly available path toward even small-scale gains. Meanwhile, he scourges nonprofits for diluting the tax base. It would be better, he argues, to tax those who can afford it rather than allowing deductible donations and “reducing the availability of public funds for public uses.” Usefully, the author also argues that identity politics centering on difference will never build a left movement, which instead must find common cause against conservatism and fascism.
Deliberately provocative, with much for left-inclined activists to ponder.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781668016015
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
Chronology, photographs and personal knowledge combine to make a memorable commemorative presentation.
Jackie Kennedy's secret service agent Hill and co-author McCubbin team up for a follow-up to Mrs. Kennedy and Me (2012) in this well-illustrated narrative of those five days 50 years ago when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
Since Hill was part of the secret service detail assigned to protect the president and his wife, his firsthand account of those days is unique. The chronological approach, beginning before the presidential party even left the nation's capital on Nov. 21, shows Kennedy promoting his “New Frontier” policy and how he was received by Texans in San Antonio, Houston and Fort Worth before his arrival in Dallas. A crowd of more than 8,000 greeted him in Houston, and thousands more waited until 11 p.m. to greet the president at his stop in Fort Worth. Photographs highlight the enthusiasm of those who came to the airports and the routes the motorcades followed on that first day. At the Houston Coliseum, Kennedy addressed the leaders who were building NASA for the planned moon landing he had initiated. Hostile ads and flyers circulated in Dallas, but the president and his wife stopped their motorcade to respond to schoolchildren who held up a banner asking the president to stop and shake their hands. Hill recounts how, after Lee Harvey Oswald fired his fatal shots, he jumped onto the back of the presidential limousine. He was present at Parkland Hospital, where the president was declared dead, and on the plane when Lyndon Johnson was sworn in. Hill also reports the funeral procession and the ceremony in Arlington National Cemetery. “[Kennedy] would have not wanted his legacy, fifty years later, to be a debate about the details of his death,” writes the author. “Rather, he would want people to focus on the values and ideals in which he so passionately believed.”
Chronology, photographs and personal knowledge combine to make a memorable commemorative presentation.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3149-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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