25 Years of The Substation: Reflections on Singapore's First Independent Art Centre
The Substation
Singapore: Ethos Books, 2015
ISBN: 9789810967987

INDEPENDENCE. OPPORTUNITY. RAW. EXPERIMENTAL. FRINGE. PROGRESS. RESPONSIVE. EMPATHY. FEARLESS. IMAGINATION. PERSEVERANCE. CHALLENGE. INCUBATOR. SUPPORTIVE. CONTEMPORARY. MULTIDISCIPLINARY. SOCIOPOLITICAL. CRITICALITY. OPENNESS. DIVERSITY. COMMUNITY. POSSIBILITIES. PASSIONATE. PROCESS. HOME.

25 Years of The Substation features the accounts of 25 artists and people who have been associated with The Substation since its founding in 1990. The book is organised around 25 words, which serve as entry points for an extended conversation about The Substation, its stakeholders, and Singaporean society and the arts.

SG100?: Leading Thinkers Envision Singapore in 2065
Chua Mui Hoong (ed.)
Singapore: Straits Times Press, 2015
ISBN: 9789814642514

Compiled into one exciting volume by Chua Mui Hoong, Opinion Editor of The Straits Times, leading thinkers give their take on trends that will shape Singapore in the next 50 years.

Will there even be a Singapore?
A Lee Kuan Yew-inspired New World Order?
How to face the 'Chinese dilemma' as China rises?
Politics in 2065: Primal or pragmatic?
Do you still need cows, if you can 3D print beef slices?
Can robot chefs serve quality char kway teow?
Cereal made from good bacteria, for your gut’s sake?
Will driverless cars become a reality?

Futurist guru Peter Schwart, leading "global city" sociologist Saskia Sassen, Prof Tommy Koh, Prof Wang Gungwu, diplomat Bilahari Kausikan, business guru Ho Kwon Ping and other opinion leaders explore the answers to these questions with thought-provoking musings that thrill, inspire and amuse.

It Never Rains on National Day: Stories
Jeremy Tiang
Singapore: Epigram Books, 2015
ISBN: 9789814655644

A woman fleeing her previous existence meets a fellow Singaporean on an overnight train in Norway. A foreign worker is decapitated in an HDB building site accident. A Singaporean wife must negotiate Beijing as her British husband awaits a heart transplant. And in different corners of the world, Singaporeans and exiles mark National Day in their own ways.

Jeremy Tiang's debut collection weaves together the lives of its characters across the world—from Switzerland, Norway, Germany, China, Canada, Thailand, New York City and back to Singapore. These wry, unsettling stories ask how we decide where we belong, and what happens to those who don't.

When a Flower Dies
Josephine Chia
Singapore: Ethos Books, 2015
ISBN: 9789810963149

What can we recover after a life passes on? A novel about love, forgetting and remembering. Pansy Lim, a Peranakan girl, was brought up in a seaside village in colonial Singapore in the 1940s. She inherits her mother's love for flowers, nature, the sea, and their healing qualities. Educated by English nuns, she learns and grows to love English, literature and poetry. We see her at the start of the novel, aged, forgetful, and desperately clinging to memories of her recently deceased husband. Through her recollections, she remembers George Chan, the village life that they shared, and the communal past left behind by a nation always on the move.

Cherry Days
David Leo
Singapore: Ethos Books, 2015
ISBN: 9789810964870

A coming-of-age story set in 1950s Singapore, written with photorealistic clarity. Skinny and his friends grow up in a self-sufficient kampong along an unnamed road. Reading about their lives, a distinctive character of their long-gone childhood and of Singapore emerges -- raw from a recently concluded war, alive with student riots and social movements.

Among the themes explored by the narrator is one of change, such as the transition from rural to urban living and the role of women in a developing society, as if inevitably the road must lead to it. Stories of love, death and forgiveness line the unnamed road at the heart of life in the kampong.

What's Inside the Red Box?
Phua San San
Singapore: Straits Times Press, 2015
ISBN: 9789814642279

This is a story about a box that holds big dreams for a little country.

There is a man whose red box is always by his side. What's inside the red box? Three children are determined to find out.

This book is inspired by Singapore's first Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew and his red box, which he used while he was in political office. It contained his work -- papers, speech drafts, letters, readings, notes and cassette tapes with his recorded instructions.

Today, the red box has become a symbol of his unwavering passion for and dedication to Singapore.

What's Inside The Red Box? gives children a peek into the big dreams Mr Lee had for the nation.

Heart of Public Service: Our Institutions / Our People
Prime Minister's Office
Singapore: Prime Minister's Office, 2015
ISBN: 9789810946883

Heart of Public Service is a two-volume book-set that honours the institutions and officers of the Singapore Public Service. Touching on key milestones in our history, Heart of Public Service brings alive Singapore's development via 11 chapters on our institutions and 50 compelling human-interest stories. Featuring stellar archival and contemporary images, Heart of Public Service is an eloquent testament to the relentless effort to build the best Public Service for the nation.

Singapore's Health Care System: What 50 Years Have Achieved
Lee Chien Earn & K. Satku
Singapore: World Scientific, 2015
ISBN: 9789814696043 / 9789814696050

How did Singapore's health care system transform itself into one of the best in the world? It not only provides easy access, but its standards of health care, not only in curative medicine but also in prevention, are exemplary. Fifty years ago, the infant mortality rate (IMR) was 26 per thousand live births; today the IMR is 2. Life expectancy was 64 years then; today, it is 83. The Singapore Medicine brand is trusted internationally, and patients are drawn to Singapore from all over the world. And while many countries struggle to finance their health care, Singapore has developed a health care financing framework that makes health care affordable for its people and gives sustainability to the health care system. Reliability is provided by a professional workforce that seeks to continually learn, improve and become ever more proficient with cutting edge technology while emphasizing the relational aspects of health care by nurturing compassion and maintaining high standards of integrity. Convenience and safety are enhanced by a unifying IT system that enables the portability of medical records across health care institutions. All these have been achieved not by chance but by careful planning, strong leadership and dedicated people who are prepared to learn from Singapore's own experience while adapting best practices from around the world. But the system is not without challenges -- not least those of an aging population, and an increasing market influence.

This book provides a fascinating insight into the development of Singapore's health care system from the early days of fighting infections and providing nutrition supplementation for school children, to today's management of lifestyle diseases and high-end tertiary care. It also discusses how the system must adapt to help Singaporeans continue to "live well, live long, and with peace of mind."

Reflections: The Legacy of Lee Kuan Yew
Yang Razali Kassim (ed.)
Singapore: World Scientific, 2015
ISBN: 9789814723886 / 9789814723879

Reflections: The Legacy of Lee Kuan Yew is a collection of essays reflecting Singapore's first Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew's immense contribution to nation-building and the idea of development, including its various models -- from government and statecraft, leadership and governance, to economic development and the management of plural societies. The essays are written by an array of authors who had worked closely with, for, or grew up under Lee Kuan Yew. As thinkers, scholars and researchers across generations, they provide different perspectives on the multifaceted and impressive legacy of Singapore's first Prime Minister. The insights offered will be of great value in future when scholars studying Singapore in particular, and nation-building in general, look back to assess what made modern Singapore so successful despite being a tiny polyglot nation-state.

The Ocean in a Drop: Singapore: The Next Fifty Years
Ho Kwon Ping
Singapore: World Scientific, 2015
ISBN: 9789814730181 / 9789814730174

Ho Kwon Ping was the Institute of Policy Studies' (IPS) 2014/15 S.R. Nathan Fellow for the Study of Singapore. This book contains the five IPS-Nathan Lectures he gave between October 2014 and April 2015, and highlights of the accompanying dialogue with the audience. In his lectures, Ho looks forward to the next 50 years, offering innovative ideas and robust views on how governance and key institutions can evolve to ensure the sustainable continuation of Singapore, the "improbable nation". This book illuminates Ho's vision of a cohesively-diverse Singapore lasting beyond the lifespan of his generation and aims to get the young to ponder and discuss what kind of home, and future, they want.

Remains: A Singapore Journey
Kostas Ikonomopoulos
Singapore: Ethos Books, 2015
ISBN: 9789810961817

The mausoleum of a Muslim saint stands next to an elevated coastal expressway. The Latin-inscribed tombstones of Christian missionaries lay half-buried and forgotten between bungalows and a childcare center. A quarantine station and detention facility is turned into a series of dormitories for tourists. And then there is the improbable shrine to a German girl turned goddess of luck.

Remains is an unorthodox travelogue, a journey through graveyards, stations, and assorted remnants of Singapore's past. It is also an effort to document locations and preserve stories in an island-city that shape-shifted from colonial backwater to glistening business hub at breakneck speed.

The book attempts a look at another Singapore, which is almost a neglected twin to the one everyone knows. It reconstructs a cultural past which is falling victim to a unique, if unavoidable, vanishing act; a past barely preserved in the form of faded gravestones, crumbling aluminum watchtowers, repainted barracks, barricaded hospitals, neglected theme parks and dismantled rail tracks.

At the same time, Remains is a meditation on the policies of development and heritage preservation and a deeply personal account of the history and the aesthetic appeal of the decayed, the forsaken and the bizarre in Singapore.

Under a Shadow
Rosaly Puthucheary
Singapore: Ethos Books, 2015
ISBN: 9789810964566

When Singapore surrendered to Japan in 1942, Rosaly Puthucheary was only six years old. Under A Shadow offers her personal account of what it was like growing up during those precarious years under the Japanese occupation. Despite the hardships of war, her childhood, as seen through the eyes of a precocious child, was not entirely marred and remained a relatively happy one. She still enjoyed the fun of pretend play with her sister Hazie and the excitement of witnessing her father's latest procurement of a new farm animal.

Unfortunately, as the occupation dragged on, it became inevitable for her family's living conditions to deteriorate. After an unpleasant incident with a Japanese officer, her family sold off almost all the farm animals and moved to a different home.

The fortune of her family runs a similar parallel to the difficulties which the people experienced during the fall of Singapore. With this memoir, Rosaly shares intimate details of her childhood and how it was affected living under an ever looming and threatening shadow.

Clinical Psychology in Singapore: An Asian Casebook
Gregor Lange & John Davison (eds.)
Singapore: NUS Press, 2015
ISBN: 9789971698546

This casebook is a unique resource, offering never before documented insights into the practices and principles of clinical psychologists within local mental health services in Singapore. The 20 fascinating chapters provide comprehensive coverage of the assessment, formulation and treatment for clients across the lifespan. It includes accounts of clients with common mental health problems such as depression and panic disorder, as well as more unusual problems like pyromania, exhibitionism and frontal-lobe epilepsy. The authors describe their successes and challenges and share how they grapple with tensions in the therapy room and with cultural and ethical issues. This casebook is an ideal complement to abnormal, counselling or clinical psychology courses.