Singapore: A Biography

Brimming with verve and dramatic incident, Singapore: A Biography offers fresh insights into the life story of this island city-state through the personal experiences of the workers, adventurers, rulers and revolutionaries who have shaped its history over the last seven centuries. The authors, drawing on research undertaken in collaboration with the National Museum of Singapore, have woven together ancient chronicles, eyewitness accounts, oral histories and even modern radio and television broadcasts to create a vivid and compelling narrative that brings the past back to life. Grounded in scholarship yet fired by the imagination, this book reveals the Singapore story to have been as rich, diverse and multilayered as the city-state is prosperous, ordered and successful today.
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Singapore was not always the orderly and succesful city-state that it appears to be now. Over the last seven centuries, the island has undergone several changes of identity. In this entertaining and wide-ranging account, drawn from research undertaken in collaboration with the National Museum of Singapore, Mark R. Frost and Yu-Mei Balasingamchow present Singapore's mercurial life-story as experienced by the people who participated in it. Singapore: A Biography brings together a Ming-dynasty travelogue, 19th-century memoirs and correspondence, modern oral histories and even radio and television broadcasts to reconnect a modern audience with the Singapore story.

While famous names from Singapore's past take their place, this new story also introduces a cast of lesser known, though no less compelling, historical personalities - from dissenting poets and radical ideologues, to patriotic factory workers and early feminists. The portrait of Singapore that emerges is dashing, lively and multi-layered, and it offers fresh insight into the ruptures and continuities that have made Singaporeans and their nation what they are today.