Asian Culture & History

Singapore 1942 – Britain’s Greatest Defeat

by Alan Warren
ISBN 9789810453206
Hardback; 370 pages
Pub Date: 2002
Price: S$38.50 (excl. GST)
BIC: HBJF

The surrender of Singapore on 15 February 1942, with the capture of over 120,000 men, was the greatest and most humiliating defeat in British history and the high point of Japanese expansion in South-East Asia. It graphically exposed the military weakness of the British Empire and its inability to defend its Far Eastern colonies. The defeat left Australia exposed to Japanese invasion, its protection in future dependent on ...
 
 

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Ho

by David Halberstam
ISBN: 9789810588021
Paperback; 120 pages
Pub Date: 2007
Price: S$25.00 (excl. GST)
BIC: BGH

In exploring the life and career of Ho Chi Minh, Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Halberstam provides a window into traditions and culture that influenced the American war in Vietnam, while highlighting the importance of nationalism in determining the war's outcome. This book describes the life of Ho, both private and public, his role in the Vietnam War, and his relations with other world leaders and governments, both before, during, and after the Vietnam War ...
 
 
 
 

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China Vignettes

by Dominic Barton and Mei Ye
ISBN 9789810580919
Paperback; 336 pages
Pub Date: 2007
Price: S$35.00 (excl. GST)
BIC: JFC

How to understand the changes sweeping China? The texture of life at a household level is captured in this new book, which seeks to understand lived experience in China, from coast to interior, city to countryside, and across the widening income divide.
This book interviews 30 Chinese men and women from different walks of life, and from different regions ...

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The King Never Smiles

by Paul Handley
ISBN 9789810801946
Paperback; 512 pages
Pub Date: Apr 2008
Price: S$35.00 (excl. GST)
BIC: BGR

Thailand’s Bhumibol Adulyadej, the only king ever born in the United States, came to the throne of his country in 1946 and is now the world’s longest-serving monarch. The King Never Smiles, the first independent biography of Thailand's monarch, tells the unexpected story of Bhumibol's life and sixty-year rule—how a Western-raised boy came to be seen by his people as a living Buddha, and how a king widely seen as beneficent and apolitical ...
 

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Through the Bamboo Window – Chinese Life & Culture in 1950s Malaya & Singapore

ISBN 9789810814663
Paperback; 296 pages
Pub Date: Apr 2009
Price: S$28.00 (excl. GST)
BIC: HBTB

This volume collects together and reprints four classic books written in the 1950s by Dr Leon Comber: Chinese Ancestral Worship; Chinese Festivals in Malaya (with Dorothy Lo); Chinese Magic & Superstition in Malaya; and Chinese Temples in Singapore. These books on Chinese life and customs were reprinted many times but have long been out of print. Written for the layperson, the style is simple and unpretentious, yet Comber’s meticulously presents a veritable cornucopia of a culture still relevant and present in modern Southeast Asia Completely reset and attractively designed this new publication addresses the rich heritage of the overseas Chinese community’s roots and ...

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