Saturday, January 25, 2014

Local Books (Jan 2014)

The Straits Times

SINGAPORE SHELF

Book it, Singapore

This new monthly column rounds up new releases from Singapore authors and publishers

By Akshita Nanda

NON-FICTION

SON OF SINGAPORE

By Tan Kok Seng

Epigram Books/Paperback/176 pages/$17.90 before GST/Major bookstores

MAN OF MALAYSIA

By Tan Kok Seng

Epigram Books/Paperback/190 pages/$17.90 before GST/Major bookstores

These books are re-releases of Tan Kok Seng's popular multi-part memoir originally written in Chinese and published in English translation during the 1980s.

Son Of Singapore details the writer's childhood as a Teochew farm boy during World War II and the Japanese Occupation, and his first job as a market coolie.

Man Of Malaysia continues his story as he lands a plum post as chauffeur to a British diplomat and overcomes parental opposition to woo the girl of his dreams.

DISSIDENT VOICES

By Clement Mesenas

Marshall Cavendish Editions/ Paperback/ 204 pages/ $23 before GST/ Major bookstores

The author, a veteran journalist, puts together the stories of 10 fiery personalities in Singapore's political scene through the decades, including the country's first chief minister David Marshall, student leader-turned-political exile Tan Wah Piow, dissident lawyer Francis Seow and first mayor Ong Eng Guannovelist and political commentator Catherine Lim.

SENSING SINGAPORE

By Devadas Krishnadas

Ethos Books/Paperback/ 256 pages/ $26.75/ Major bookstores

This is a collection of recent writings from establish noted political commentator Devadas Krishnadas, on issues from the Singapore birth rate to the new world economy dominated by China, India and Brazil.

GRAPHIC NOVEL/ PICTUREBOOK

THE ROCK AND THE BIRD

By Chew Chia Shao Wei, illustrated by Anngee Neo

Epigram Books/ Hardcover/50 pages/ $16.90 without GST/Major bookstores This fable about the friendship between a timeless rock and a mortal bird won the 2009 Commonwealth Essay Writing Competition.

DATE KING 2: MATING SEASON

By Adrian Teo And Ken Foo

Epigram Books/ Paperback/96 pages/ $9.90 before GST/ In bookstores on Feb 7 The authors depict the comic misadventures involved in finding the right partner in Singapore. A sequel to last year’s Date King 1: Singapore Dating.

YOUNG ADULT FICTION

Zac Lee And The Legend Of Yamashita’s Gold

By Erwin Chan Marshall

Cavendish/ Paperback/224 pages/ $13.97 without GST/ In bookstores mid-next month Can Zac Lee solve the clues left by his missing father and find the long-lost World War II treasure of Japan’s General Yamashita? Erwin Chan’s debut novel is for readers aged nine to 14.

Saturday, January 18, 2014

The Memoirs And Memorials Of Jacques De Coutre: Security, Trade And Society In 16th- And 17th-century Southeast Asia

Rare look into S-E Asia from 400 years ago

Trader's account details its political, trading landscape

By Zakir Hussain Indonesia Bureau Chief

The Memoirs And Memorials Of Jacques De Coutre: Security, Trade And Society In 16th- And 17th-century Southeast Asia

Edited by Peter Borschberg

Translated by Roopanjali Roy NUS Press (2014)

TWO major powers jostle for political and economic leverage in the Strait of Malacca and the South China Sea, with the occasional armed skirmish in these waters.

They find allies in the region, and try to set up bases to entrench their presence, angering a good number of locals in the process.

If this sounds like today's news, it was also true four centuries ago, as laid out in a young Flemish trader's gripping rendition.

Written in Spanish, in a style that could pass for a blog today, these accounts are now available in English under the title The Memoirs And Memorials Of Jacques De Coutre: Security, Trade And Society In 16th- And 17th-century Southeast Asia.

The 453-page volume is by a historian of the region in those heady days of European expansion, when explorers from Spain and Portugal - then two kingdoms under the same king - were battling the upstart Dutch, irking sultans across the Malay Peninsula and the King of Siam in the process.

The book is a rare first-hand account of the political and trading landscape of present-day South- east Asia between 1593 and 1603.

Dr Peter Borschberg, who has taught at the National University of Singapore for almost 20 years and written about the history of international law as well as trade in South- east Asia, supplies an introduction and detailed notes throughout the book, and includes 62 maps and drawings of the period.

Born in Bruges in what is today Belgium, Jacques de Coutre and his brother left for Lisbon and then reached Portuguese Goa in India in 1592, where they appear to have parted ways. Barely 20 years old, he ventured to Portuguese Melaka the following year. It would be his home base for the next decade.

From there, he ventured past what is now Singapore on several occasions, visited Pahang, Johor, Pattani and Ayutthaya, was held captive by the King of Siam for eight months, and also made his way to Cambodia and Cochinchina (in today's Vietnam), as well as today's Brunei and Manila.

The first part of this book contains his memoirs and detailed observations of ports he visited, including Batavia (today's Jakarta).

On what is today Pekan, in Pahang state, de Coutre notes: "The city was entirely surrounded by wooden walls, with a good quantity of bronze artillery, which the natives themselves cast... Even though it was small, it was very fertile and verdant, and it even has gold mines."

But it is de Coutre's descriptions of Singapore in that period that are the most detailed and strengthen the case that it was already a hub for shipping more than 200 years before the British arrived.

It was, he noted, no sleepy village but a trading outpost where ships crossing farther east berthed for food, supplies and favourable winds. And its principal settlement was the Shabandaria - named after the shahbandar, or harbour master - roughly where today's Beach Road runs.

"The passage is very narrow, and there is a great deal of maritime traffic with many ships from different kingdoms," he writes of the waterway between Keppel and today's Sentosa.

The orang laut, he notes, live in boats with their "dogs, cats, even hens with their chicks", help guide passing ships, and come on board with fresh fish and water and local fruits: durians, mangosteens, rambutans and duku.

But the sailors are cautious, given the occasional attack. De Coutre himself was once caught out, in 1595, when their junk was berthed while sailing from Melaka to Siam. He and three companions rowed out to Sentosa for fresh water but had to use guns to repel a group of attackers.

While his memoirs are fast- paced and full of colour, the second part of the book - shorter memos written to the Spanish crown - is effectively military advice.

It is here that de Coutre proposed the building of several forts on Singapore to safeguard Spanish and Portuguese interests in the region.

"Your Majesty should become the lord of this port, which is one of the best that serves the Indies," he wrote. "Your Majesty could build a city there and become the lord of this kingdom."

One fortress, he said, should be on the north-western tip of today's Sentosa - where the British later built Fort Siloso - to take advantage of its fresh water and ample supply of stone, wood and coral that could be pounded up to be used as mortar.

A second fort, he advised, should be roughly where Changi Point is today, while a smaller third fort could be built near Pulau Tekong. These would help monitor the Strait of Singapore and arrest the advances the Dutch were making in the East. And if the King were to send 40 galleons, he added, these would more likely "put an end to, destroy and expel the Dutch who are in the East Indies".

Alas, these were never followed up on - whether through neglect or more pressing priorities, we do not know.

But one wonders, what if those forts had been built?

zakirh@sph.com.sg

The book is available at major bookstores at $45.

Hegarty On Creativity - There Are No Rules (2013, Thames & Hudon)

Liberating ideas

Advertising powerhouse Sir John Hegarty says the key to creativity is to be aware of your surroundings

By Lisabel Ting

You could walk past Sir John Hegarty on the street and never know that you had brushed shoulders with one of the greats of the advertising industry today.

With a mopful of tousled grey hair, a crumpled casual jacket and mismatched striped Paul Smith socks peeping over the tops of grey lace-ups, Hegarty embodies one of the key concepts he writes about in his first book, Hegarty On Advertising: Irreverence.

"Irreverence encourages you to be challenging and it doesn't accept the status quo. It injects into your ideas a sort of vibrancy that makes people want to find out, why are you saying that, why are you challenging? And because we live in a competitive world, that's exactly what you have to do," says Hegarty, 69.

It was that attitude which turned Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH), founded by Hegarty, John Bartle and Sir Nigel Bogle in 1982, into one of the powerhouses of the advertising world today. Their first major campaign over three decades ago was for Levi's black denim. It featured a sea of white sheep, with a single black sheep facing the other way. The slogan for it was "when the world zigs, zag". It was so successful that BBH adopted the black sheep as its logo, and the campaign's slogan as its motto.

Hegarty was in town earlier this week to promote his second book, Hegarty On Creativity - There Are No Rules. The 128-page book is a collection of aphorisms and observations on creativity, distilled from Hegarty's years of experience in the industry, accompanied by a few of his light- hearted doodles.

Speaking to SundayLife! from BBH's Singapore office in Clarke Quay, Hegarty says: "I felt that somebody needed to write something on creativity. Everybody talks about it... but nobody talks about what is needed or how to be creative, what you should do and what you should expect."

Having been a stalwart of the advertising industry for more than three decades, Hegarty, who is divorced, has seen it through its ups and downs. "This is probably the most exciting time to be in advertising because of what's happening with digital technology. It's coming at us like a tsunami, and understanding how to use it is actually quite difficult.

"People often say that digital technology has revolutionised the communications industry, but I keep telling them, 'No, I don't think it's revolutionised it, it's liberated it'.

"What it's allowed us to do is have an idea, and take that idea in an interesting way to a community of people out there, which we couldn't do before."

Hegarty, who was knighted last year, says that it will take time for creative minds to wrap their heads around the potential of the digital age. "When you look at the development of any piece of significant technology, there's always what I call the creative deficit - nobody knows quite what to do with it. When the Lumiere brothers invented the moving camera, they didn't realise they had invented Hollywood. It takes creative people to go, 'I think we can do this with that.'"

In order to be one of those creative pioneers, Hegarty says that the key is to constantly be aware of your surroundings. He is notorious for his disdain of headphones: "One of the things I always say to creative people is, 'Please take off your headphones.' If you wear them, you create a little bubble to walk around in. Great creative people absorb all the time, and that comes back out in your work without you realising it."

While Hegarty thinks that the advertising industry is now in the "creative deficit" phase of its approach to the digital age, he is optimistic about its future. "I think it has a phenomenal future. A creative industry constantly evolves, constantly questions and constantly challenges," he says.

"But increasingly, as there's more and more stuff out there, the need for the disciplined thinking of advertising is ever more essential."

lting@sph.com.sg

Hegarty On Creativity - There Are No Rules (2013, Thames & Hudon, $15.90), will be available at major bookstores from Jan 27.

Saturday, January 11, 2014

The Secret Life Of Bees and The Invention Of Wings by SUE MONK KIDD

Memories of racism

Sue Monk Kidd's novel tells the stories of a white girl, 11, her slave, 10, and their relationship over 35 years

By Akshita Nanda

"As a white person, I think it is daunting... I've always felt a responsibility to write about what I saw, to redeem some of that through storytelling. It's part of my history too."

SUE MONK KIDD, on being hesitant to write about the violence of racism. Memories of growing up in a town where racism was a fact of life have led American author Sue Monk Kidd to write best-selling stories about strong black women.

The author is known for the word-of-mouth hit The Secret Life Of Bees (2002), about a motherless white girl and the black women who raise her. The author's third and newest novel, The Invention Of Wings, returns to the theme of civil rights through the story of two sisters who campaigned to abolish slavery in 19th century America.

The book was released last Tuesday and is Oprah's book club pick for this month, an accolade likely to send sales skyrocketing, especially since the influential celebrity calls it "a conversation changer".

Kidd's most famous novel, The Secret Life Of Bees, was published in 2002 by Penguin - the first publisher she showed it to - longlisted for the international Orange Prize for women's fiction and made into a 2008 movie starring Dakota Fanning and Queen Latifah. It has sold about eight million copies worldwide.

The Invention Of Wings, published by Hachette in the United Kingdom and Viking in the United States, is based on the lives of Sarah and Angelina Grimke, 19th-century activists from Kidd's hometown, Charleston. It also brings in the voice of female slaves such as Sarah's maid Hetty, known to other slaves as Handful.

In a telephone interview from her home on the Florida coast, the 66-year-old author says: "I was certainly drawing on memories of growing up in the South in the 1950s and 1960s. There was a lot of racism and segregation at that time. Those memories are very vivid and painful."

She was 54 before she turned her memories into fiction, in part because she was daunted by her race.

She studied nursing at Texas Christian University, later taking creative writing courses at Emory University and Anderson College. She spent her 30s and 40s writing non-fiction articles for magazines such as Reader's Digest to supplement the family income.

Her husband Sandy is a Baptist minister and they have two grown children, daughter Ann and son Bob.

The Secret Life Of Bees is set in 1960s South Carolina and features some of what the author witnessed as a child growing up in the area.

As she says in the reading guides to her books, white supremacist members of the Ku Klux Clan policed her hometown and balled-up paper was thrown at the black students in her school, one of the first in the country to have an "integrated classroom" featuring students of all races.

On the telephone, she recalls feeling hesitant to set this down on paper. "As a white person, I think it is daunting. I can't say it didn't cross my mind and cause me to pause. I felt I was embarking on new territory but I was very compelled to it.

"I've always felt a responsibility to write about what I saw, to redeem some of that through storytelling. It's part of my history too."

In 2009, Singapore's National Library Board chose the book as one of the must-read titles for annual literacy campaign Read! Singapore. The author's other books have sold at least 25,000 copies here in the past decade, according to one distributor, Pansing Singapore.

A second novel, The Mermaid's Chair, about a woman questioning her marriage even as she cares for her deeply ill mother, was published in 2005. It won the consumer-driven Quill Award for fiction that year, and was made into a 2006 television movie starring Kim Basinger for the Lifetime Channel.

Kidd next wrote a travelogue with her daughter Ann, then in her 20s: Travelling With Pomegranates (2009) was about their travels through Greece, Turkey and later France between 1998 and 2000.

While writing that book, Kidd encountered the story of the Grimke sisters during a visit to the Brooklyn Museum.

Surprised that she knew so little about these women from her own hometown, she began researching their story and decided to write a novel based on their lives.

"It was challenging. I was trying to write from this intersection of imagination and history, that can be very difficult. I really revered Sarah Grimke's life and history and I didn't want to deviate from it very much," says the writer.

However, it was even more difficult trying to get into Hetty's head, given her concerns over whether she could accurately represent the plight of such a character.

"This novel, it's even further out on that literary limb. I'm writing in the voice of an enslaved African-American woman," she says with a laugh.

"In the end, my larger feeling is that I'm not as worried about appropriation, I'm more concerned about closing these divides. This woman, Hetty Handful, is not unknowable to me, not inseparable and I could inhabit her heart and mind."

So what would the author like readers to take away from the book? She takes a while to choose the right words.

"My first thought is, I want the reader to learn something new about slavery and history. More than that, I want the readers to take away a felt expression of this story.

"I hope the reader can experience empathy, what it might have been like to be an enslaved woman in the 19th century or to be a woman in the 19th century, what it feels like to be denied rights.

"I think that is really the gift of fiction. It's the ability the reader has to feel the characters' lives."

The Invention Of Wings is available at major bookstores and retails at $27.06 before GST.

akshitan@sph.com.sg
Copyright © 2014 Singapore Press Holdings. All rights reserved.

Extraordinary Losers: Operation Pants On Fire and Captive In The Dark by Jessica Alejandro (Who are more than what others think of you)

The Straits Times

Bookends

By Akshita Nanda

Who: Singapore writer Jessica Alejandro, 33, recently released the third novel in her Extraordinary Losers series for 10- to 14-year-olds.

The series is published by local imprint Bubbly Books and follows the adventures of four primary school pupils who are misfits in their class, but possess unusual abilities.

The most recent novel, Extraordinary Losers: Captive In The Dark, was released in November.

In it, the team gets in trouble when a kidnapper targets them before an important race.

The first book in the series, Extraordinary Losers: Operation Pants On Fire, was shortlisted last year for the $10,000 Hedwig Anuar Children's Book Award for a striking work of local fiction, but lost to Where's Grandma?, writer Edmund Lim's story of a family coping with Alzheimer's disease.

Alejandro is a full-time writer and part-time teacher of English and creative writing. She is married to maths and science teacher Aw Jee Siang, 36.

"Extraordinary Losers came about because I realised children equate success in school to good grades," she says.

"Intelligence is measured in such shallow ways that it is a little sad. I wanted them to know that each of them is special in some way, even if he or she seems to be a nobody."

What are you reading now?

I haven't had much time to read lately but I love poems, andI enjoy Poetry Of The Romantics, selected by Paul Driver and published by Penguin Books. It has poems by William Blake and William Wordsworth, my two favourite poets .

There's so much meaning to unravel and room for imagination. Poetry is every reader's playground, I feel.

What book would you save from a burning house?

I would save the only book that has had real meaning in my life - the Bible.

Books by Jessica Alejandro, such as Extraordinary Losers: Captive In The Dark (2013, Bubbly Books, $13.80), are available at major bookstores. Poetry Of The Romantics, edited by Paul Driver (2012, Penguin, $64.90) is available at Amazon.com
Copyright © 2014 Singapore Press Holdings. All rights reserved.

Friday, January 3, 2014

RON ROLHEISER'S TEN FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2013

MY TEN FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2013

2013-12-22

De gustibus non est disputandum. That's a famous line from St. Augustine wherein he suggests that taste is subjective and that what one person fancies might not be to another person's liking. Under that canopy I would like to recommend the following books to you. Among the books that I read in 2013, these ten stayed with me in ways that the others didn't. So, with no promises that your tastes will echo mine, here goes ...

Among the different novels that I read, I recommend:

Alice Munro's, Dear Life - Stories: These stories won't give you easy moral comfort, but will stretch you. They're moral in that they name things as they are. Munro might have entitled these stories - It is what it is! Since publishing this novel, she has won the Nobel Prize for Literature, no surprise to anyone in Canada.

Barbara Kingsolver's, Flight Behavior: This is a novel about global warming which won't be everyone's cup of tea, though everyone will learn from it. More important even than her moral message is the flashlight she shines into ordinary life. Told from the viewpoint of a young mother, trapped in poverty and frustrated by her lack of education and her lack of choices, Kingsolver brilliantly lays bare a human heart, with both its temptations and its virtues.

Toni Morrison's, Home: Morrison isn't easy reading, and her story line isn't always the easiest to follow, but her writing is art, the best, and her language conveys a color and feeling that has few equals among novelists. She didn't win the Nobel Prize for literature undeservedly.

Within the genre of biography and history, these books stood out:

Roger Lipsey's, Hammarskjold, A Life: Lipsey, using mountains of material from Dag Hammarskjold's journals and letters, reveals that Hammarskjold was all that was hinted at in Markings, and more. Hammarskjold, both as a public figure and in his private life, tried to mirror the greatness of life. Nearly 800 pages long, it's worth the effort, the story of a great soul.

Brenna Moore's, Sacred Dread, Raissa Maritain, the Allure of Suffering and the French Catholic Revival (1905-1944): Not an easy read, but anyone with an interest in the world of Maritains, Leon Bloy, Charles Peguy, and the French Catholic Revival at the beginning of the last century will be given a deeper insight into that world.

Kay Cronin's, Cross in the Wilderness: An old book, published in 1960, and now available only in libraries, Cronin traces the history of the Oblate missionaries coming to Oregon and British Columbia and opening churches there. I was truly inspired by the selflessness and courage of these men and what they accomplished. French intellectuals, many of them, they were sent into the wilderness with little preparation and survived there on ideals and faith, and flat-out toughness. Food, shelter, and doctors often weren't available. Reading their story made me, more than ever, proud to be a member of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate.

Mary Gordon's, The Shadow Man, A Daughter's Search of Her Father: We only understand ourselves when we understand our parents and how their virtues and weaknesses helped shape our own souls. Mary Gordon, better than most, has been able to do this. Many of us are familiar with her brilliant book on her mother, Circling my Mother. Here she does the same thing with her father. How she understands her father will help us to understand our own.

In the area of spirituality, I much recommend:

Belden C. Lane's, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, Desert and Mountain Spirituality: Very much in the genre of Bill Plotkins', Soulcraft, Lane gives us insights into the important role that geography can play in shaping our souls, and hints of how we might more deliberately expose ourselves to that. For Lane, spirituality isn't something that should be done only in air-conditioned prayer centers. Rather, nature, the desert, the wind, and the sun need also to wash over our souls and bodies.

Jim Wallis', Rediscovering Values - On Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street, A Moral Compass for the New Economy: This book should come with a warning: It will upset you if you're a fiscal conservative, but, if you are, you might want to give yourself this challenge. Wallis is as close to a "Dorothy Day" as our generation has.

Donald H. Dunson's and James A. Dunson's, Citizen of the World, Suffering and Solidarity in the 21st Century: Socrates once said that he was a citizen of the world first and only, after that, a citizen of Athens. How do we widen our hearts and our attitudes so as to live out a citizenship that's wider than our own ethnicity, nationality, history, geography, self-interest, and natural affinity? Donald and James Dunson try to answer that, and they do it with remarkable nuance. This book is a genuine moral compass, what prophecy should be. Good prophets don't spray you with guilt; they make you want to be a better person.

Again, de gustibus non est disputandum