SINGAPORE – In this week’s Singapore Shelf, The Straits Times looks at advocacy in Singapore and the country’s history and relationship with animals. Buy the books at Amazon. These articles include affiliate links. When you buy through them, we may earn a small commission.
Book review: We Are Not The Enemy is a wide-ranging volume of essays on growing civil society in S’pore
This contemporary survey of advocates and activists in Singapore starts off with a thesis that should really not be as subversive as it feels: that the transformative changes that Singapore has experienced as a society might not have occurred, if not for civil society activism.
Constance Singam, co-editor of this volume and grande dame of social movements in Singapore, cites the repeal of Section 377A in 2022 and requirements for domestic workers to have a weekly rest day from 2013 as the hard-earned results of persistent lobbying by groups such as Pink Dot SG and Transient Workers Count Too.
Flipping the official narrative of Government-led progress, she asserts the necessity of this stratum of the public sphere that is oft-demonised. Its individuals have been branded as troublemakers or even traitors, and doxxed and harassed by anonymous social media trolls.
Book review: A lively history of otters, crocodiles and other Singaporean Creatures
What claims do animals – say, the Zouk otters of social media fame, the feared and dengue-carrying mosquito Aedes aegypti or Singapore’s most iconic orang utan Ah Meng – have to being Singaporean?
Surely not by dint of legal citizenship or self-identification, but perhaps by the status Singapore’s human denizens and policymakers have bestowed on these creatures.
One might recall Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s words in 2018 upon the death of Inuka, the first polar bear born in the tropics at the Singapore Zoo: “He was as Singaporean as any of us.”
A new volume of essays on environmental history furnishes a lively and persuasive account of Singapore’s relationship with animals from the mid-20th century onwards. It follows the fate and agency of creatures like the crocodile from the final years of British colonial rule to Singapore’s nascent independence up to the present.
Freelance photographer Ian Poh Jin Tze invites readers into his world of travel and agriculture
Singaporeans may rave about the rich, creamy flavour of durian, but how many know where the fruit comes from and its long journey to the table?
Freelance photographer Ian Poh Jin Tze, 37, chronicles the process of durian farming in one of the five stories in his debut book, Behind The Scenes: Lives Of These Unsung Heroes.
Made up of photos taken by him and accompanied by stories of his experiences on the road, the book feels like a glimpse behind the scenes of yet another easily overlooked industry.
Book review: Yeoh Jo-Ann mixes cats and coffee in a quixotic but aimless novel
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a book with “cat” in the title must be catnip for the bestseller charts.
Witness the phenomenon of The Travelling Cat Chronicles (2012) by Hiro Arikawa, or other Straits Times bestsellers such as The Cat Who Saved Books (2017) by Sosuke Natsukawa and the Singapore-set The Community Cat Chronicles (2020) by Lachlan Madsen and Eleanor Nilsson.
The latest feline fiction to claw its way to the top of the charts is Deplorable Conversations With Cats And Other Distractions, the second novel of Malaysia-born, Singapore-based Yeoh Jo-Ann.
The Straits Times’ Weekly Bestsellers April 20
Butter by Asako Yuzuki returns to the top of the fiction bestsellers list.
