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I don t agree with all of it, but that is to be expected the Western journalist s exaggeration of eccentricity. But on the whole, he got my point of view across ----Lee Kuan Yew on Conversations with Lee Kuan Yew (Giants of Asia Series)
… a scintillating insight into the private - and brutally candid - beliefs and thoughts of the 86-year-old Minister Mentor on a wide range of topics, from his temper and children to various countries and his 'authoritarian' ways. …. These are captured in a writing style that is fast-paced and conversational over 24 chapters that are peppered with Mr Plate's views… --Zakir Hussain IN The Straits (of Singapore)
There are two types of courage among journalists. Some might risk their lives crossing paths with an IED on an arid back road in Afghanistan. Many fewer risk their reputation by going against the herd of conventional opinion. Tom Plate, America's only syndicated columnist who focuses on Asia, … has taken the second risk in his Conversations with Lee Kuan Yew. And it has been a risk well worth taking. … His book could not be more relevant at a moment when recession, debt and dysfunction are plaguing the West while Asia strides boldly into the future. …. Much to the credit of Plate's talent, this book reads breezily, despite its heavy themes. It is broken into many easily digestible chapters with titles mimicking movies or television shows …. Overall this was the right choice to make what could easily have been a wonkish drudge into an enjoyable read….. Lee Kuan Yew's wisdom makes sense. Tom Plate has done a fine job of conveying it for a Western audience that ought to be paying attention --Columnist Nathan Gardels in The Huffington Post
… a scintillating insight into the private - and brutally candid - beliefs and thoughts of the 86-year-old Minister Mentor on a wide range of topics, from his temper and children to various countries and his 'authoritarian' ways. …. These are captured in a writing style that is fast-paced and conversational over 24 chapters that are peppered with Mr Plate's views… --Zakir Hussain IN The Straits (of Singapore)
There are two types of courage among journalists. Some might risk their lives crossing paths with an IED on an arid back road in Afghanistan. Many fewer risk their reputation by going against the herd of conventional opinion. Tom Plate, America's only syndicated columnist who focuses on Asia, … has taken the second risk in his Conversations with Lee Kuan Yew. And it has been a risk well worth taking. … His book could not be more relevant at a moment when recession, debt and dysfunction are plaguing the West while Asia strides boldly into the future. …. Much to the credit of Plate's talent, this book reads breezily, despite its heavy themes. It is broken into many easily digestible chapters with titles mimicking movies or television shows …. Overall this was the right choice to make what could easily have been a wonkish drudge into an enjoyable read….. Lee Kuan Yew's wisdom makes sense. Tom Plate has done a fine job of conveying it for a Western audience that ought to be paying attention --Columnist Nathan Gardels in The Huffington Post
… a scintillating insight into the private - and brutally candid - beliefs and thoughts of the 86-year-old Minister Mentor on a wide range of topics, from his temper and children to various countries and his 'authoritarian' ways. …. These are captured in a writing style that is fast-paced and conversational over 24 chapters that are peppered with Mr Plate's views… --Zakir Hussain IN The Straits (of Singapore)
There are two types of courage among journalists. Some might risk their lives crossing paths with an IED on an arid back road in Afghanistan. Many fewer risk their reputation by going against the herd of conventional opinion. Tom Plate, America's only syndicated columnist who focuses on Asia, … has taken the second risk in his Conversations with Lee Kuan Yew. And it has been a risk well worth taking. … His book could not be more relevant at a moment when recession, debt and dysfunction are plaguing the West while Asia strides boldly into the future. …. Much to the credit of Plate's talent, this book reads breezily, despite its heavy themes. It is broken into many easily digestible chapters with titles mimicking movies or television shows …. Overall this was the right choice to make what could easily have been a wonkish drudge into an enjoyable read….. Lee Kuan Yew's wisdom makes sense. Tom Plate has done a fine job of conveying it for a Western audience that ought to be paying attention --Columnist Nathan Gardels in The Huffington Post
… a scintillating insight into the private - and brutally candid - beliefs and thoughts of the 86-year-old Minister Mentor on a wide range of topics, from his temper and children to various countries and his 'authoritarian' ways. …. These are captured in a writing style that is fast-paced and conversational over 24 chapters that are peppered with Mr Plate's views… --Zakir Hussain IN The Straits (of Singapore)
There are two types of courage among journalists. Some might risk their lives crossing paths with an IED on an arid back road in Afghanistan. Many fewer risk their reputation by going against the herd of conventional opinion. Tom Plate, America's only syndicated columnist who focuses on Asia, … has taken the second risk in his Conversations with Lee Kuan Yew. And it has been a risk well worth taking. … His book could not be more relevant at a moment when recession, debt and dysfunction are plaguing the West while Asia strides boldly into the future. …. Much to the credit of Plate's talent, this book reads breezily, despite its heavy themes. It is broken into many easily digestible chapters with titles mimicking movies or television shows …. Overall this was the right choice to make what could easily have been a wonkish drudge into an enjoyable read….. Lee Kuan Yew's wisdom makes sense. Tom Plate has done a fine job of conveying it for a Western audience that ought to be paying attention --Columnist Nathan Gardels in The Huffington Post
… a scintillating insight into the private - and brutally candid - beliefs and thoughts of the 86-year-old Minister Mentor on a wide range of topics, from his temper and children to various countries and his 'authoritarian' ways. …. These are captured in a writing style that is fast-paced and conversational over 24 chapters that are peppered with Mr Plate's views… --Zakir Hussain IN The Straits (of Singapore)
There are two types of courage among journalists. Some might risk their lives crossing paths with an IED on an arid back road in Afghanistan. Many fewer risk their reputation by going against the herd of conventional opinion. Tom Plate, America's only syndicated columnist who focuses on Asia, … has taken the second risk in his Conversations with Lee Kuan Yew. And it has been a risk well worth taking. … His book could not be more relevant at a moment when recession, debt and dysfunction are plaguing the West while Asia strides boldly into the future. …. Much to the credit of Plate's talent, this book reads breezily, despite its heavy themes. It is broken into many easily digestible chapters with titles mimicking movies or television shows …. Overall this was the right choice to make what could easily have been a wonkish drudge into an enjoyable read….. Lee Kuan Yew's wisdom makes sense. Tom Plate has done a fine job of conveying it for a Western audience that ought to be paying attention --Columnist Nathan Gardels in The Huffington Post
… a scintillating insight into the private - and brutally candid - beliefs and thoughts of the 86-year-old Minister Mentor on a wide range of topics, from his temper and children to various countries and his 'authoritarian' ways. …. These are captured in a writing style that is fast-paced and conversational over 24 chapters that are peppered with Mr Plate's views… --Zakir Hussain IN The Straits (of Singapore)
There are two types of courage among journalists. Some might risk their lives crossing paths with an IED on an arid back road in Afghanistan. Many fewer risk their reputation by going against the herd of conventional opinion. Tom Plate, America's only syndicated columnist who focuses on Asia, … has taken the second risk in his Conversations with Lee Kuan Yew. And it has been a risk well worth taking. … His book could not be more relevant at a moment when recession, debt and dysfunction are plaguing the West while Asia strides boldly into the future. …. Much to the credit of Plate's talent, this book reads breezily, despite its heavy themes. It is broken into many easily digestible chapters with titles mimicking movies or television shows …. Overall this was the right choice to make what could easily have been a wonkish drudge into an enjoyable read….. Lee Kuan Yew's wisdom makes sense. Tom Plate has done a fine job of conveying it for a Western audience that ought to be paying attention --Columnist Nathan Gardels in The Huffington Post
Product Description
Imagine the delight and challenge of entering into a one-on-one political and personal conversation with the founding father of modern Singapore. This is exactly the timely treat that awaits you in Conversations with Lee Kuan Yew. The first in the Giants of Asia series, this succinct, penetrating, richly detailed and candid book on Lee Kuan Yew represents the Asian legend s first extended conversation with a Western journalist. The result is often surprising, sometimes startling, occasionally humorous and never, ever dull. Enter into the mind of this controversial but internationally respected political leader and pioneer, through the eyes and ears of one of America s leading journalists on Asia.
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9 reviews
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful
Great subject: weak book
2 Feb 2011
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
I deeply sympathize with what Tom Plate was trying to do here. LKY is a great man who has unfairly been maligned and ignored by the Western journalistic establishment. Mr Plate was trying to bring a sympathetic portrait of LKY and his views to Westerners. Unfortunately, he wasn't the man to do it.
The book is the result of a couple of hours worth of interview Mr. Plate conducted with LKY over the course of two days in July of 2009. Unfortunately, Mr. Plate spends too much of the text relaying his thoughts and his end of the conversation. I didn't buy this book to get some Western journalist's views and observations: I want to know what LKY thinks. I don't care what LKY looks like (I can watch him on the Charlie Rose show for that), or how much he coughs, and I found the Irving Berlin "fox or hedgehog" metaphor Plate kept trotting out to be imbecilic and disrespectful. I'm sure Mr. Plate is a nice enough fellow, and it's obvious his heart is in the right place. Unfortunately, despite all his impressive credentials, he wasn't the right person for this job. I don't know who would be these days. Certainly it needs to be someone more culturally conservative than Plate: you don't go asking a modern day Lykurgus what kind of dope he likes to take when he's stressed out. Not only is that not interesting: it simply isn't done by civilized people. Projecting your vices onto others is ... insulting.
While Plate is to be commended for not bothering LKY with the type of nonsense that usually obsesses Western reporters (aka, "why don't you accord more power to unaccountable Western type reporters, so we can make a mess of your country like we did our own?"), he also didn't ask enough interesting questions. What would I have liked are LKY's views on American politics and culture. I'm pretty sure he's thought about it, but nobody is asking him about it. As a citizen of a decaying empire, one which LKY has a selfish interest in preserving, I'd really like to know what he thinks of our problems. Not the silly problems: the big ones -the death of the family, the decline of civic life, corruption, the decline of the political class, the vastly complex politics between the races and interest groups in American society, the problems with immigration and assimilation, our halfwitted class of semi-educated "bohemian bourgeois" -and what about our oligarchs? How did LKY deal with them in his own country, and how did he co-opt his would be Singapura oligarchs towards the good of his society? What would he suggest if Barack Obama asked him for advice .... on any subject. Even a dumb policy nerd issue like Health Care: I'd like to know what LKY thinks, and how he did it in Singapore (yes, their system is superior by any measure, and from what I know about how it works, it will make nobody with a political axe to grind in America happy). Heck, I'd like to know what LKY thinks about the fertility crisis in his country. Since the same disease afflicts the entire civilized world, it might be interesting to know what someone with the LKY brain and honest tongue thinks about such matters. Nope; instead I know what LKY wore on a July afternoon in 2009, that Tom is a mush headed goofball who takes prozac, and that LKY gave Tom a nice hug afterwords. That's just plain weak-sauce. I'm no professor of Journalism, but if you stuck me in the room with someone as interesting as LKY for ... I dunno, 45 minutes, I could come back with more material for a book than this. And you know what? I wouldn't have gotten the Michael Fay date on page 33 wrong either, because I never made my brain into swiss cheese by taking Prozac. Jaybers.
Plate does provide a lot of useful connecting history for people who don't know anything about that part of the world; I suppose those passages were acceptable, but I would expect anyone interested in LKY to know about the opium wars, or the fact that caning was a British invention. Plus, what there is of LKY in here is fascinating and entertaining. As such, it merits a couple of stars above par.
The book is the result of a couple of hours worth of interview Mr. Plate conducted with LKY over the course of two days in July of 2009. Unfortunately, Mr. Plate spends too much of the text relaying his thoughts and his end of the conversation. I didn't buy this book to get some Western journalist's views and observations: I want to know what LKY thinks. I don't care what LKY looks like (I can watch him on the Charlie Rose show for that), or how much he coughs, and I found the Irving Berlin "fox or hedgehog" metaphor Plate kept trotting out to be imbecilic and disrespectful. I'm sure Mr. Plate is a nice enough fellow, and it's obvious his heart is in the right place. Unfortunately, despite all his impressive credentials, he wasn't the right person for this job. I don't know who would be these days. Certainly it needs to be someone more culturally conservative than Plate: you don't go asking a modern day Lykurgus what kind of dope he likes to take when he's stressed out. Not only is that not interesting: it simply isn't done by civilized people. Projecting your vices onto others is ... insulting.
While Plate is to be commended for not bothering LKY with the type of nonsense that usually obsesses Western reporters (aka, "why don't you accord more power to unaccountable Western type reporters, so we can make a mess of your country like we did our own?"), he also didn't ask enough interesting questions. What would I have liked are LKY's views on American politics and culture. I'm pretty sure he's thought about it, but nobody is asking him about it. As a citizen of a decaying empire, one which LKY has a selfish interest in preserving, I'd really like to know what he thinks of our problems. Not the silly problems: the big ones -the death of the family, the decline of civic life, corruption, the decline of the political class, the vastly complex politics between the races and interest groups in American society, the problems with immigration and assimilation, our halfwitted class of semi-educated "bohemian bourgeois" -and what about our oligarchs? How did LKY deal with them in his own country, and how did he co-opt his would be Singapura oligarchs towards the good of his society? What would he suggest if Barack Obama asked him for advice .... on any subject. Even a dumb policy nerd issue like Health Care: I'd like to know what LKY thinks, and how he did it in Singapore (yes, their system is superior by any measure, and from what I know about how it works, it will make nobody with a political axe to grind in America happy). Heck, I'd like to know what LKY thinks about the fertility crisis in his country. Since the same disease afflicts the entire civilized world, it might be interesting to know what someone with the LKY brain and honest tongue thinks about such matters. Nope; instead I know what LKY wore on a July afternoon in 2009, that Tom is a mush headed goofball who takes prozac, and that LKY gave Tom a nice hug afterwords. That's just plain weak-sauce. I'm no professor of Journalism, but if you stuck me in the room with someone as interesting as LKY for ... I dunno, 45 minutes, I could come back with more material for a book than this. And you know what? I wouldn't have gotten the Michael Fay date on page 33 wrong either, because I never made my brain into swiss cheese by taking Prozac. Jaybers.
Plate does provide a lot of useful connecting history for people who don't know anything about that part of the world; I suppose those passages were acceptable, but I would expect anyone interested in LKY to know about the opium wars, or the fact that caning was a British invention. Plus, what there is of LKY in here is fascinating and entertaining. As such, it merits a couple of stars above par.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
A thoroughly disappointing book.
27 May 2011
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
I saw Lee Kuan Yew (LKY) interviewed on Charlie Rose a few days ago. I found LKY truly engaging and set out to learn more of his perspectives on various political and economic matters, and his general views on geopolitics. From the description of this book, and the author's credentials, I expected a thoughtful series of intentional interviews. I was hoping that the book would be structured to unfurl various layers of Yew's historical campaign for the development of Singapore, and lead to a clear exposition of what LKY saw for the future of Singapore in Asia. Instead, I found this to be a very poorly planned book. The author is an LKY fan who might have designs on becoming LKY's publicist. It appeared he wanted to write a "biography", but was not authorized to do so. The raw audio tapes must have been acquired sincerely, but randomly. The content spanned by the actual questions and their answers was too sparse to constitute a 'conversation". This very meager content was wrapped in a thick, breezy narrative, that seemed to repeatedly circled back to the author's admiration for LKY, and the fact that Singapore is hot. The selections of questions and verbatim quotes, that is, the conversation I wanted to hear, seemed to be chosen to illustrate the thoughts and attitudes of the author, more than those of LKY. The interrupting narrative very often degenerated into decorative verbal frivolity. At first, I found the metaphors for LKY, and the occasional Runyonesque, purple prose describing the settings, the author's reactions, and other irrelevant aspects of these encounters, to be unintentionally funny, but by the time I was halfway through this book, they became entirely annoying. I recommend that anyone seriously interested in hearing LKY in his own words will do better to find and view the televised Charlie Rose episode. Rose's conversation occurs faster, but it yields much more insight.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Simply Conversing
20 May 2011
Format:Hardcover
In this book, we go into the mind of Mr Lee Kuan Yew (LKY).
According to him, leadership in Asia needs to be firm and
not necessarily popular.
And leaders need to be respected in
Asia. It is bad to be overly nice because these leaders get
run over by those who are not nice.
LKY is not a theorist. He is a utilitarian (pragmatist) who
finds out what works and let others find out the principles
and theory behind it.
LKY is a pragmatic Confucian Neo-Utopian. He is not process-
oriented. He is product-oriented i.e. more concerned with
results. He is the nexus of Plato and Machiavelli.
From this book and others on LKY, it can be seen that LKY
has a telescopic view - able to see as far as 20 or more years
ahead. He also has a helicopter view - able to see the big
picture. Yet he can zoom into the details when necessary
- he microscopic view. He also has the submarine view -
the depth of knowledge on the issues he spoke about. After
all, he has had more than fifty years of experience in
politics.
A pretty short book which can be completed in a short time.
......... 20 May 11
According to him, leadership in Asia needs to be firm and
not necessarily popular.
And leaders need to be respected in
Asia. It is bad to be overly nice because these leaders get
run over by those who are not nice.
LKY is not a theorist. He is a utilitarian (pragmatist) who
finds out what works and let others find out the principles
and theory behind it.
LKY is a pragmatic Confucian Neo-Utopian. He is not process-
oriented. He is product-oriented i.e. more concerned with
results. He is the nexus of Plato and Machiavelli.
From this book and others on LKY, it can be seen that LKY
has a telescopic view - able to see as far as 20 or more years
ahead. He also has a helicopter view - able to see the big
picture. Yet he can zoom into the details when necessary
- he microscopic view. He also has the submarine view -
the depth of knowledge on the issues he spoke about. After
all, he has had more than fifty years of experience in
politics.
A pretty short book which can be completed in a short time.
......... 20 May 11
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