Speaks For Itself

Simple Truth

Continued Learning

Bring People Together

Pioneering Aviator

Author Unknown

Wisdom No 1011

Ailment: Bookitis

Rich People's Problems (Rich Series) by Kevin Kwan

Paperback:  Kevin Kwan, best-selling author of Crazy Rich Asians (2013) and China Rich Girlfriend (2015), is back with an uproarious new novel of a family riven by fortune, an ex-wife driven psychotic with jealousy, a battle royal fought through couture gown sabotage, and the heir to one of Asia's greatest fortunes locked out of his inheritance.

When Nicholas Young hears that his grandmother, Su Yi, is on her deathbed, he rushes to be by her bedside - but he is not alone.  The entire Shang-Young clan has convened from all corners of the globe to stake claim on their matriarch's massive fortune.  With each family member vying to inherit Tyersall Park - a trophy estate on 64 prime acres in the heart of Singapore - Nicholas' childhood home turns into a hotbed of speculation and sabotage.

As her relatives fight over heirlooms, Astrid Leong is at the center of her own storm, desperately in love with her old sweetheart, Charlie Wu, but tormented by her ex-husband - a man hell-bent on destroying Astrid's reputation and relationship.

Meanwhile, Kitty Pong, married to China's second richest man, billionaire Jack Bing, still feels second best next to her new stepdaughter, famous fashionista Colette Bing.

In this sweeping tale that takes us from the elegantly appointed mansions of Manila to the secluded private islands in the Sulu Sea, Kevin Kwan hilariously reveals the long-buried secrets of Asia's most privileged families and their rich people problems in his third and latest book in the Rich trilogy, Rich People's Problems (2017).

About the author:  Kevin Kwan was born and raised in Singapore, where he attended Anglo-Chinese School in the mornings and spent his afternoons either hiding from his Chinese tutor or chasing after neighbourhood dogs on his bike.  When he was eleven, he moved to the United States, where the next few years were a blur of trying to survive high school, reading too much F Scott Fitzgerald and Joan Didion, and dreaming of living in New York.

After obtaining his first degree in creative writing from the University of Houston, Kevin moved to Manhattan to pursue a BFA at Parsons School of Design.  Kevin's early years in the city were spent working for Martha Stewart Living, Andy Warhol's Interview magazine, and M&Co, the legendary design firm founded by Tibor Kalman.

In 2000, Kevin established his own creative studio, where he specialized in producing high profile visual projects for clients such as the New York Times, the Museum of Modern Art, Rockwell Group, and TED.com.  Many unforgettable experiences followed, like creating the ultimate publishing tribute to Oprah Winfrey's groundbreaking television show, handling Elizabeth Taylor's fabled jewel collection while producing Elizabeth Taylor:  My Love Affair with Jewelry, and serving as the visual consultant for the re-launch of the TED website, which exceeded a billion views in November 2012.

Throughout all this, Kevin always remained passionate about books.  As he became sought after as a visual consultant by acclaimed authors like Michael Korda, Gore Vidal, and Larry McMurtry, Kevin was inspired to return to his first love - writing.  His critically-acclaimed debut novel Crazy Rich Asians became an international bestseller in 2013 and is now being made into a major motion picture by director Jon M Chu and Warner Brothers Studios.  Its sequel China Rich Girlfriend also became a smash hit around the world, and the final book in the trilogy, Rich People Problems, was released in May 2017.

Kevin still resides in Manhattan, eats too much pasta, and these days dreams of living in Italy.

Rating:  5/5

Poet's Tree by Shel Silverstein

The Cyanide Canary (Current Events) by Joseph Hilldorfer and Robert Dugoni

Hardback:  In the early 1900s, coal miners burdened with heavy picks, shovels, and candles for their headlamps, carted canaries into the bowels of the earth with them.  The small bird's internal organs were highly sensitive to the lethal gases the mining operations could disturb:  methane, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide.  If a canary fell from its perch, the miners knew they had scant minutes to get out of the mine before being overcome as well, or having a flame ignite a thunderous explosion.  So valued and respected were these tiny creatures that the miners brought glass cages with air tanks to revive them and carried them to safety.  The term cyanide canary became a common expression.  While the beloved birds have since given way to technology, the coal miners' compassion was strictly a human quality, neither improved upon nor necessarily shared by all men.

The Cyanide Canary (2004) is the riveting true story of a horrific crime - of a brave young man left for dead, an unscrupulous business mogul, and the relentless EPA investigator who fought to overcome injustice.

On a crisp summer morning in Soda Springs, Idaho, twenty-year-old Scott Dominguez kissed his fiancée goodbye and went to work for Allan Elias, the owner of Evergreen Resources, an enterprise Dominguez thought was in the business of producing fertilizer from mining waste.  A former high school wrestler blessed with Tom Cruise-like good looks, Dominguez seemed to have unlimited potential, but by eleven o'clock that morning he was fighting for his life, pulled unconscious from a cyanide-laced storage tank and not expected to live through the night.

In Seattle, Special Agent Joseph Hilldorfer of the Environmental Protection Agency was given the job of finding out what happened to Dominguez and why.

Initially, Hilldorfer did not want the case, still frustrated by an intense two-year investigation that concluded with corporate polluters walking out of a federal courthouse free.  But as he learned more, Hilldorfer, the son of a Pittsburgh cop with a blue-collar work ethic, was touched by Scott's suffering and outraged at Elias's callous disregard for his employees' well-being.

Hilldorfer and his partner, Special Agent Bob Wojnicz, joined forces with seasoned Boise Assistant US Attorney George Breitsameter and an indefatigable, brilliant young attorney from the Department of Justice's Environmental Crimes Section named David Uhlmann.  Together they would uncover the horrifying truths and build the criminal case against Elias.

A former New York whiz kid and Arizona real estate and business mogul, Elias owned businesses that had polluted Idaho with hazardous waste for nearly a decade.  Yet Elias never spent a single day in jail, openly boasted of beating the environmental quality regulations, and avoided any significant fines.

Would this case by any different?

Hilldorfer, Uhlmann, and the government trial team embarked on an epic courtroom battle that would stretch them to the limits.  What began as a struggle for justice for one young man became a fight by the EPA for its very ability to enforce the nation's environmental laws and to bring environmental polluters to justice.  In the balance was whether Allan Elias would ever spend a day in jail.

Gripping, powerful, and compulsively readable, The Cyanide Canary is a major achievement in the classic tradition of A Civil Action, a book that unfolds like fiction yet is alarmingly true.

About the authors:  Joseph Hilldorfer is a Special Agent for the Environmental Protection Agency and a member of the National Counter-Terrorism Evidence Response Team.  He has been involved in high-profile environmental investigations in the Pacific Northwest since 1992.  Prior to joining EPA, Hilldorfer was a distinguished Special Agent with the FBI in Seattle and New York City, working high-profile cases such as the Green River Killer and going undercover for the Counter-Espionage Squad.  With an MA in Criminal Justice Administration from Indiana University of Pennsylvania and a law degree from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, he is admitted to the Pennsylvania bar.  He lives in Seattle, Washington.

Robert Dugoni has practised as a civil litigator in San Francisco and Seattle for seventeen years.  In 1999, he left the full-time practice of law to write, and is a two-time winner of the Pacific Northwest Writers Association Literary Contest.  He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford University with a degree in journalism and worked as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times before obtaining his doctorate of jurisprudence from the University of California at Los Angeles School of Law.  He lives with his wife and two children in the Pacific Northwest.

The Power Of StoryTelling

Butterflies in November by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir

Paperback:  It is precisely at that moment that it first dawns on me that I am a woman caught in a finely interwoven pattern of feelings and time, that there are many things going on simultaneously that have a significance to my life, that events don't just simply occur in a linear sequence, but on several plains of thought, dreams and feelings at the same time, that there is a moment at the heart of every moment.  It is only much later that a thread through the turmoil that has occurred will emerge.

After a day of being dumped - twice - and accidentally killing a goose, a young woman yearns for a tropical vacation far from the chaos of her life.

Instead, her plans are wrecked by her best friend's four-year-old deaf-mute son, thrust into her reluctant care.  But when the boy chooses the winning numbers for a lottery ticket, the two of them set off on a road trip across Iceland with a glove compartment stuffed full of their jackpot earnings.

Along the way, they encounter black sand beaches, cucumber farms, lava fields, flocks of sheep, an Estonian choir, a falconer, a hitchhiker, and both of her exes desperate for another chance.

What begins as a spontaneous adventure will unexpectedly and profoundly change the way she views her past and charts her future.

Butterflies in November (2013) is a blackly comic, uniquely moving, charming, extraordinary, uplifting and hilarious tale of friends and lovers, motherhood, self-discovery and the legacy of life's mistakes.

Butterflies in November is translated from the Icelandic by Brian FitzGibbon.

About the author:  Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir was born in Reykjavík, Iceland, in 1958.  She studied art history and art theory in Paris and is a lecturer in history of art at the University of Iceland and a director of the University of Iceland Art Collection.  The Greenhouse, published in 2007 won the DV Culture Award for literature and a women's literary prize in Iceland, was nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Award and received unanimous acclaim.  Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir lives and works in Reykjavik.

Rating:  5/5

First Confession: A Sort Of Memoir by Chris Patten

Hardback:  'Who am I? Who are we?'

Most politicians write autobiographies to 'set the record straight' and provide retrospective justification for their careers.  That is not the case with this book.  'It occurred to me that to track down myself would enable me to discuss an issue that had begun to intrigue me, namely the relationship between politics and identity, the things that had shaped me and whether and how they had come to reflect my life and opinions. 

As I wrote, the question of identity moved from the wings to centre stage, and roiled politics and nations on both sides of the Atlantic.'

Chris Patten's career has taken him from the outer London suburbs to the House of Commons, a seat in the Cabinet, last Governor of Hong Kong, Chairman of the BBC and Chancellor of Oxford University.  About all of these he is enlightening and entertaining.  He has unexpected and telling things to say about each of the three Prime Ministers for whom he worked - Edward Heath, Margaret Thatcher and John Major.

But his political heroes - Baldwin, Macmillan, Butler - came from an earlier time:  he is proud to be 'wet', and reckons all his paladins were pretty damp themselves.  Then, unusually, Patten uses each phase of his life as a spur to reflect upon its contemporary situation - education, America, conservatism, Ireland, China, Europe and finally the question of links between violence and religion.  Unlike one No 10 press secretary, Patten definitely 'does God'.

At the end, the reader has an impression of someone who knows himself as well as any of us can, and who continues to think, passionately and intelligently, about the world around him.  Wise, funny and opinionated, First Confession (2017) is a different sort of memoir, a meditation on personal and political identity which, in an age of simplification, reminds us of the complexities of both.

About the author:  Chris Patten is currently Chancellor of Oxford University.  As a British MP (1979-92) he served as Minister for Overseas Development, Secretary of State for the Environment and Chairman of the Conservative Party, being described afterwards as 'the best Tory Prime Minister we never had' (Observer).  He is well known for being the last Governor of Hong Kong (1992-7), about which he wrote in East and West (1998).  Both that and his most recent book, Not Quite the Diplomat:  Home Truths about World Affairs (2005), were No 1 international bestsellers.  In 2008, he wrote What Next? Surviving the Twenty-First Century.  He was made a Companion of Honour in 1998 and a life peer in 2005.