Singapore Shelf: Pioneers and port cities
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SINGAPORE – In this week’s Singapore shelf, The Straits Times looks at books about pioneers and a monograph on port cities.Buy the books at Amazon
Enigmas is Simon Tay’s love letter to his father, Singapore’s first spy chief
Author Simon Tay is behind Enigmas: Tay Seow Huah, My Father, Singapore’s Pioneer Spy Chief.
PHOTOS: LANDMARK BOOKS, COURTESY OF SIMON TAY
Magni nominis umbra, or in the shadow of his greatness.
This Latin dictum was the motto of King Edward VII School in Malaysia’s Taiping, where Simon Tay’s father, Tay Seow Huah, studied in the 1940s.
Originally referring to humility in God’s glory, it equally applies to Simon’s motivations for writing Enigmas. The blend of historical, memoiristic and creative fiction elements is the product of over four decades of the author processing his father’s death in 1980, when the elder Tay was 47 and the younger just 19.
“As a son, this bears on you,” says Simon, now 63 and conscious of his own “end of life” and legacy, over Zoom. “I was writing poetry and stories which touched on various parts of my father’s life, but only now can I make some sense of it as a whole.”
This delayed reckoning is little wonder, for Seow Huah was no ordinary man.
Book review: Great Port Cities Of Asia illuminates historic narratives from an Asian perspective
Kennie Ting's The Great Port Cities Of Asia: In History takes the reader on a whistle-stop tour of 60 port cities.
PHOTOS: ST FILE, TALISMAN
There are no boring histories, only boring storytellers.
And one certainly cannot accuse Kennie Ting, outgoing director of the Asian Civilisations Museum (ACM), of being boring. In his stint at the ACM, he has shown a knack for translating dry academic research in accessible and, I dare say, even fun ways for the layman.
His books have followed in similar fashion, cherry-picking historical anecdotes and reframing them in a readable fashion that makes history come alive for both the layman and the engaged amateur.
His latest book, The Great Port Cities Of Asia: In History, is a handsomely produced hardcover, jam-packed with information and illustrations. It is a whistle-stop tour through 60 port cities which have been critical nodes of trade, political, cultural and social exchanges over two millennia of human history.
Book review: Late lawyer Adrian Tan’s If I Were King Of Singapore a loose set of LinkedIn musings
Adrian Tan is witty and snappy in the posthumous collection of writings, If I Were King Of Singapore.
PHOTOS: LIANHE ZAOBAO FILE, LANDMARK BOOKS
Adrian Tan, the late president of the Law Society of Singapore,
His best-selling novels The Teenage Textbook (1988) and The Teenage Workbook (1989) have sold close to 90,000 copies as at June 2023. The books follow the lives and loves of junior college students, and the first novel was adapted into a film by director Phillip Lim.
On LinkedIn, the self-professed “King of Singapore” attracted more than 37,000 followers with his varied writings on topics ranging from political and legal issues around migrant worker rights to the repeal of anti-gay sex law Section 377A to social topics around cultural history and social media use.
An alternative title for the book could be The Collected LinkedIn Posts Of Adrian Tan. Readers who followed Tan closely on social media would recognise most, if not all, of these as occasional writings that he penned in response to hot-button issues of the day.
The Straits Times’ Weekly Bestsellers May 11
PHOTOS: BOOKS KINOKUNIYA, THE WOKE SALARYMAN, SCHOLASTIC
A Perfect Day To Be Alone by Nanae Aoyama, about loneliness and heartbreak, tops the fiction bestsellers list.
