Singapore From Temasek to the 21st Century: Reinventing the Global City
Karl Hack, Jean-Louis Margolin, & Karine Delaye (eds.)
Singapore: NUS Press, 2010
ISBN: 9789971695156

Once a centre for international trade and finance, Singapore is now a "global city". Singapore from Temasek to the 21st Century: Reinventing the Global City examines its evolution from trading port to city-state, showing how Singapore has repeatedly reinvented itself by creating or re-asserting qualities that helped attract capital, talent and trade. In the 14th century, the island's prosperity rested on regulating the regional carrying trade passing through the Straits of Melaka. In 1819, after a long period of decline, the British East India Company revived the island's fortunes by making Singapore a "free" port, and trade sustained the city until the Japanese occupation and the postwar collapse of colonial rule. After independence, Singapore resumed its role as a major centre for trade and finance, but added facilities to make the island a regional centre for manufacturing. More recently, it has transformed its population into an educated and highly-skilled workforce, and has made the island an education hub that is a magnet for research and development in fields such as biotechnology.

Singapore's dramatic, centuries-long struggle defies description as a sequentially unfolding narrative, or merely as the story of a nation. In this volume, a group of international scholars examines the history of Singapore as a series of discontinuous and varied attempts by a shifting array of local and foreign elites to optimise advantages arising from the island's strategic location and overcome its lack of natural resources. Part I sets the scene by considering different ways of looking at the island's long-term history and evaluating Singapore as a global city. Part II provides a series of snapshots of Singapore between the 14th and 21st centuries, positioning the island as a major node in regional and world history, and evaluating the local political and social structures that have underpinned the city's ability to function as a major urban centre and ensured its long-term survival.

A Cancer Vaccine That Transformed Singapore and the World: The Battle Against Hepatitis B
Gabriel Oon Chong Jin & Karen Kwek
Singapore: Straits Times Press, 2011
ISBN: 9789814266598

Hepatitis B is one of the world's most influential killer diseases - even more contagious than HIV. Today the hep B virus afflicts more than 360 million people worldwide. Between 1983 and 1985, select groups of Singaporeans took part in clinical trials - undertaken by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) - of a revolutionary vaccine against hepatitis B. In Singapore, 1 October 2010 marks the 25th anniversary of the implementation of the National Hepatitis B Vaccination Programme, aimed at eradicating the infectious liver disease from all newborns in the country. The success of this programme led, ten years later, to a gathering of world experts in Singapore to endorse the hepatitis B vaccine as a safe and effective preventive of a disease now recognised as one of the major causes of primary liver cancer in the world.

This book tells the full story of Singapore's groundbreaking hep B vaccination programme - including the medical research, entrepreneurial spirit and political foresight that drove it - and commemorates the work of a handful of pioneers who had the audacity to challenge the conventions of their time and, in so doing, transform national and world history.

Reaching for Stones: Collected Poems (1963-2009)
Chandran Nair
Singapore: Ethos Books, 2010
ISBN: 9789810867171

Chandran Nair's poetry has been described as impressing with its "versatility and hard brilliance of style" as well as providing an important study of how growing up in Singapore with an English education and Chinese, Indian and Malay influences shape points of view in poetry in English. The poems reveal a real and not "a revolving man" in the words of one reviewer, while another feels that the poems succeed not merely through technical competence but also because "he writes with feeling. It is his feelings that we see most of the time, a kaleidoscope of changing emotions and events through which Mr Nair stands unchanged, unyielding and uncompromised."

The 101 poems in this collection represent two volumes of poetry, Once the Horsemen and Other Poems (1972) and After the Hard Hours, This Rain (1975)as well as poems since published in journals and anthologies in many countries and not collected into book form. They provide an interesting glimpse into the post-colonial literature in English of Singapore and Malaysia.

Bioethics in Singapore: The Ethical Microcosm
John M. Elliott, W. Calvin Ho, Sylvia S.N. Lim (eds.)
Singapore: World Scientific, 2010
ISBN: 9789814327114

This book provides an analysis of the ways in which the Bioethics Advisory Committee (BAC) has established an ethical framework for biomedical research in Singapore, following the launch of the Biomedical Sciences Initiative by the Singapore Government. The editors and authors have an intimate knowledge of the working of the BAC, and the focus of the book includes the ways in which international forces have influenced the form and substance of bioethics in Singapore. Together, the authors offer a comparative account of the institutionalisation of biomedical research ethics in Singapore, considered in the wider context of international regulatory efforts. The book reviews the work of the BAC by placing it within the broader cultural, social and political discourses that have emerged in relation to the life sciences since the turn of the 21st century. This book is not primarily intended to be a retrospect or an appraisal of the contribution of the BAC, though this is one aspect of it. Rather, the main intention is to make a substantive contribution to the rapidly emerging field of bioethics. Ethical discussions in the book include consideration of stem cell research and cloning, genetics and research with human participants, and focus on likely future developments as well as the past.

Many of the contributors of the book have been personally involved in this work, and hence they write with an authoritative first-hand knowledge that scholars in bioethics and public policy may appreciate. As indicated above, the book also explains the way in which ethics and science - international and local - have interacted in a policy setting. Scholars and policy makers may find the Singaporean experience to be a valuable resource, as the approach has been to make the ethical governance of research in Singapore consistent with international best practice while observing the requirements of a properly localised application of universally accepted principles. In addition, at least three chapters (the first three chapters in particular) are accessible to the lay reader interested in the development of bioethics and biomedical sciences, both inside and outside Singapore, from 2000 (the year in which the BAC was established). Both scholars and interested lay readers are therefore likely to find this publication a valuable reference.

Cheong Soo Pieng: Visions of Southeast Asia
Yeo Wei Wei (ed.)
Singapore: The National Art Gallery, 2010
ISBN: 9789810864224

Cheong Soo Pieng was a pioneer artist who created visually fresh pictures of Southeast Asia's landscapes and people. By marrying the artistic traditions of the East and West, he broke new ground in the way the tropics were portrayed. From painting to sculpture and mixed media, Cheong Soo Pieng's works single him out as the most versatile and experimental artist of his generation.

This book is the first of its kind on Cheong Soo Pieng. Never before have his key works been so comprehensively and beautifully reproduced in book form. Through 199 illustrations - old photographs, hitherto unpublished sketches - and 94 colour plates, the artist's dedication to his craft is brought to life. Cheong Soo Pieng: Visions of Southeast Asia is a testament to his legacy.