Kwong Weng’s debut memoir recounts a life of remarkable persistence.
Born in Toa Payoh in Central Singapore, Kwong Weng enjoyed a happy if modest upbringing. Failing to win a spot in a teacher’s program at the National University of Singapore, he joined the army, convinced of his academic inferiority. He was assigned to the Singapore Police Force, but he longed to become a commando and successfully petitioned his way into the training program. He advanced steadily through the ranks from second lieutenant to Ranger instructor. He was offered an opportunity to train with the U.S. Navy SEALs in San Diego, a notoriously grueling process. Midway through the training schedule, a car accident left him in a coma with a punctured lung and broken collarbone. He eventually recovered and was able to complete his certification, which the author describes as more a psychological than physical challenge involving the delicate negotiation of one’s expectations. Kwong Weng left the military at 35 to pursue work in the private sector—he became an intelligence analyst at a think tank—and despite his earlier academic floundering, earned a Ph.D. in security studies and crisis management at Glasgow University. Kwong Weng ended up working in Myanmar, and one of the highlights of this remembrance is his trenchant commentary on that small nation’s emergence from years of tyranny. It’s simply impossible not to be inspired by Kwong Weng’s life. He repeatedly overcame difficulties and was naturally optimistic when confronted by failure. The prose is simple, unadorned, and clear. The narrative meanders a bit here and there, especially when he discusses his family—an experienced editor would have trimmed some superfluous detail. Also, some challenges—like his failed marriage—are glossed. The principal difficulty of the book, though, is no coherent thread pulls it all together, despite his insistence that he reflects back on his life for the sake of inferring usable lessons. At one point, he offers the strangest advice one could find in a retrospective memoir: “Don’t bother looking back to get answers; it’s better to focus on the present.” This is an uplifting tale, but the author’s meditations on it are muddled.
An inspiring story that needs a unifying theme.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-9-81-463400-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Marshall Cavendish International (Asia) Pte Ltd
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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