Let’s Talk About Books

All that discussion about Nevil Shute stirs up memories of some of the wonderful books that I have read aeons ago. Up to about 12 years ago, I read a lot of fiction.

When I started working, I used to get my books from a second hand book store called Saints located at Bukit Timah Plaza. They had two prices stamped on the book. You paid the higher price printed on top and when you returned the book, they refunded you the amount printed at the bottom. Do they still have this practice?

My preferences tended to be influenced by the author. Once I have a liking for a particular author, I would go on to read most of his books. My earliest favourite, of course was Nevil Shute. This was followed later by Herman Wouk. More ‘recent’ additions were Arthur Hailey, Frederick Forsyth and James Mitchener.

Arthur Hailey’s stories have this unique focus on a particular industry or profession. For example, Wheels took place in the automobile industry, Strong Medicine was on the drugs industry, Money Changers was on banking industry and Hotel was obviously from the hotel industry. My favourite was Strong Medicine. I remember reading it during my slow and arduous train ride back from Ipoh after my first visit there to meet my (then) girl friend’s parents and then returned alone by train. (She stayed on as it was the school holidays.)

My two favourite Frederick Forsyth books were No Comebacks and The Fourth Protocol. The first was actually a compilation of short stories. The second had to do with nuclear weapons I think.

I liked James Mitchener too, but his books are very thick, and so it was a challenge to read all his books. I think I read Poland, Space and The Source. I liked the last one most because he touched on many events depicted in the Old Testament.

But my favourite authors are still Nevil Shute and Herman Wouk. Maybe it’s a case of ‘first love’.

Nevil Shute has written more than twenty novels and I have read most of them. His ‘heroes’ tended to be very simple people – maybe that’s the attraction to common people like me. Speaking of common people, I saw a Taiwanese movie about a writer who wrote a book entitled， “一个平凡人的故事” or An Ordinary Man’s Story. But anyway, I have digressed. The three books by Nevil Shute that I enjoyed most are, No Highway, An Old Captivity and Requiem for a Wren.

No Highway was the text for our O-level literature, and so I remember the story well. It’s about an eccentric metalurgist at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Theodore Honey, who believed the company’s plane, the Reindeer had a problem with metal fatigue which causes it to fail after 1,440 hours of flight. He was sent to Labrador to investigate one such plane crash. But midway, he discovered that the very plane he was traveling in, also a Reindeer, had already flown more than 1,440 hours. He was unable to convince the pilot to turn back, and so in desperation, when the plane landed in transit, he forcefully grounded it by lowering the undercarriage (or something equally dramatic). Of course that created a huge row. Another team was sent to Labrador to investigate the first plane crash. Meantime, Honey got to know and fall in love with one of the plane’s air stewardesses, Marjorie Corder who not only took good care of him, but also his daughter Elspeth. He was a widower. Of course, you get no prizes for guessing the ending of this story.

An Old Captivity was about a pilot who was hired by a professor to carry out an aerial survey of Greenland. During the expedition he fell ill and had strange dreams of himself as a slave on a Norse long ship of about a thousand years before.

Requiem for a Wren is rather sad story of Janet Prentice a navy girl whose fiance, an Australian marine sergeant by the name of Bill Duncan was killed in the war. (A Wren by the way, is not a bird but an employee of the Women's Royal Naval Service). Troubled by all the death, violence and destruction in which she had played a part, she found her way to Australia after the war, and took up the position of a parlour maid in the home of her fiancé, without their knowledge. She became very close to Bill’s mother. Meantime, Bill’s brother, Alan, the only person in the Duncan family who has met her before, was searching for her. He was a pilot who had lost both his feet in the war and was depressed and was returning to Australia. Unable to face the prospect of Alan's imminent return, Janet commits suicide.

But my all-time favourite books were Winds of War and its sequel War and Remembrance by Heman Wouk. Both were voluminous books exceeding one thousand pages. I read Winds in 1977 and eagerly waited three years for its sequel which came out in 1980. These were historical novels, but the events recorded were real. Winds traced the 2nd World War from September 1939 to the bombing of Pearl Harbour. Remembrance continued till the end of the war. History was told through the eyes of one Victor Henry and his family who were somehow present at all the big events of the war.

History was never so exciting as told in these two books. I particularly relished the detailed and spellbinding description of the Battle of Midway in Remembrance. In between the narration, the author inserts segments of the war diary of a fictitious German general, thus giving the war a different perspective.

If you have an appetite for such epics, I would highly recommend these two books. After all, history is just as relevant today as it was to the young man who read them more than a quarter century ago. But, if you don’t have the patience, you can still get the dvds because both these books were made into television mini-series starring Robert Mitchum as Victor Henry. As for me, I think I still have the books somewhere in my store room. I plan to reread and savour them one day. When I can find the time. When I am retired maybe.

I promised my librarian friend, Ivan Chew to do a book review of a couple of books from a quarter of a century ago. I think I have ‘gone the extra mile’ here, if I may borrow a favoured tag line from our government.

But the pleasure is all mine.

Dragon Boat Competition Photos

Below are some photos that I took at last weekend's Inter-Schools dragon boat competition held at Bedok Reservoir.

Good camera, great weather, wonderful subjects, but ... sigh .... lousy camera man.

Slide Rule

My favourite author is Nevil Shute. He wrote many novels including No Highway, which I studied for my O Levels in 1968 and A Town Like Alice. Both have been made into movies. Nevil Shute was an aeronautical engineer by profession and he also wrote an autobiography entitled Slide Rule.

Now, I have a question for the young people (below 30). Do you know what is a slide rule?

If you have never heard of a slide rule, do not feel embarrassed. I once put this question to my nephew, a polytechnic graduate, and he too did not know what it was. To my surprise, so did a few other young people I put the same question to.

Here’s another question. You must watched documentaries of the 2nd World War and seen some of those amazing fighting machines like air craft carriers, submarines or even Hitler’s inter-continental ballistic missile, the V2. In fact, at the time of the Korean War, in the fifties, when the jet fighter started to be used, or during the early part of the space race in the 60’s, the electronic calculator had not arrived yet. To design, produce and operate these engineering marvels must have required an immense amount of mathematical calculations and data crunching. How on earth were they able to do it when they did not even have a simple electronic calculator? Has this question ever occurred to you?

The answer is the slide rule and its cousin the log book (which we learned to use in secondary school). According to my dictionary, the slide rule is “an old-fashioned instrument that looks like a ruler with a middle part that slides, used for calculating.”

Do you know that the ubiquitous calculator that even the vegetable seller in our wet markets use nowadays was not around until the 1970’s. I remember my university days in the early seventies. We had to use the slide rule for all our calculations. Although, the scientific calculator was available by then, we were not allowed to use them for our exams. The reason is that they were simply too expensive and very few students could afford one. For example, did you know that an HP scientific calculator cost more than $1,000! I had the chance to use one courtesy of my brother-in-law who worked as a refinery technologist.

(Well, actually at that time, he was courting my sister, and maybe wanted to impress me by lending me his precious HP scientific. I remember bringing it to class and getting my class mates all envious.)



Although, I have been advising my readers to get rid of things they do not need (in my other blog ), I am really glad that I did not throw away my slide rule. In fact, it is still in very good condition complete with protective case and instructional manual. Mine was an expensive model from Faber Castell. It was made of 'Geroplast' and cost slightly more than $30. The cheaper ones were usually made of bamboo and imported from China.





The slide rule is one of those human inventions that was seen as an essential tool one day and then became obsolete practically overnight with the arrival of the pocket calculator. Here’s an interesting snippet about the slide rule from Wikipedia:

“Throughout the 1950's and 1960's the slide rule was the symbol of the engineer's profession (in the same way that the stethoscope symbolized the medical profession). As an anecdote it can be mentioned that German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun brought two 1930s vintage Nestler slide rules with him when he moved to the U.S. after World War II to work on the American space program. Throughout his life he never used any other pocket calculating devices; slide rules obviously served him perfectly well for making quick estimates of rocket design parameters and other figures. Aluminum Pickett - brand slide rules were carried on five Apollo space missions, including to the moon, according to advertising on Pickett's N600 slide rule boxes.”

How to use the Slide Rule? Sorry to say that apart from simple multiplication and division, I have forgotten. And I am too lazy to read up the instruction manual just to explain it here. But if you are really interested, I have listed a few websites below which explain in detail how to use the slide rule.

Still, I hope you learned something new today.

Wikipedia Slide Rule Site
Eric’s Slide Rule Site
How a Slide Rule Works
Another great slide rule site

Bullying - Lam Chun Chew

I read an article in Channelnewsasia.com about a rather alien phenomenon for me called cyber bullying. Some examples of such cyber bullying listed were: Sending anonymous hate mail and insulting text messages, vandalising blogs, and forwarding to other people pictures taken of classmates in toilets.

I think this problem is quite universal. Right from school boy bullying, which we experienced from our younger days, up to big nations bullying smaller ones in world arena, the mode is the same – taking on the weaker ones. This dastardly immoral act even led to many students taking their own lives in Japan. The educational authorities there are wringing their hands in despair, and unable to tackle such problems effectively. In Singapore, I think parents are more assertive and our education authorities are quick to act. Hence bullying problems here are less severe. For this topic, I can only speak for myself.

During my primary school days, I too feared bullies, because I was by nature a timid fellow. But one thing was towards my advantage. I was unusually tall for my age. I was told by teachers to sit at the back of the class or stood last in a row. Still, there were children who tried to bully me when I was alone. Being a loner put me at a serious disadvantage.

One day when I was in Primary one, in Serangoon English School, I was standing on top of a slope when someone me gave a hefty shove from behind, causing me to roll down to the field. I didn’t even know who did it, but heard a group of boys laughing away. I just let the matter rest.

Even in the kampong, I wasn’t spared. A group of kampong boys, usually in threes would wait for me at a kampong path, some distance away from my home. They laid an ambush, stones in hand, and when I appeared alone, they would taunt me and threw the stones in my direction. Again, I think because of my height, these boys dared not physically handle me. After some time they gave up when I put up a false front, as though I was not afraid of them.

I remember another incident which happened just before I left the primary school, when the school holidays were about to begin. There was no lesson, and everyone was in holiday mood. Then there was this short mischievous boy in the class (he later became an RAF pilot) suddenly decided to shove me and threw me off-balance, without any rhyme or reason, just trying to create problems. I saw him coming and before he could do something I gave him counter push. He fell instead. I was surprised of my own strength, probably due to tree climbing and my unusual height.

But, generally, there was little bully in my school, simply because our principal was an ex British Army officer who would not tolerate any breakdown of discipline. Luckily the shoving incident was not reported, otherwise the principal would hang us onto the first tree he found.

One day after a swimming session, my uncle and I were travelling on board a bus heading home. It was crowded, and as I was alighting, a huge guy shoved me purposely near the doorsteps and acted as though he had the right of way before anyone. I lost my balance and nearly fell. My bespectacled uncle intervened and shouted at that guy: “Hey, what are you doing? You want a fight? Let us settle after going down the bus!” My uncle handed me his Sunday Times and was ready to confront this guy who chickened out on seeing how fierce my uncle was. He quickly walked away. This lesson taught me that if I am right, I should stand firm. My uncle was the type, to take action first, and talk later. This type of action seems reckless, but it works when facing a bully.

My uncle used to lecture me: “Do you know that when I was about your age (eleven years old), I used to travel over Malaya in a train alone, looking for my elder brothers. Basing on my uncle’s advice, it is good to have certain amount aggressiveness and self-confidence. If not, we should do something about it.

Footnote: The writer of this article is my brother Chun Chew, not me. I totally do not subscribe to our uncle's philosophy of aggressiveness and settling issues with the fist. - Lam Chun See

What the wise professor said

I read two graduation speeches that blogger Tuckshop Boy has posted at his website. The speakers were Steve Jobs and Carly Fiorina. They reminded me of some pearls of wisdom that my own university professors handed out to us more than 3 decades ago.

I was studying at the newly set up Industrial and Systems Engineering Department of the then University of Singapore. Our head of department was a Professor Donald E. Morgan from the United States. One day, he made us write an essay, which was quite a novel thing then, maybe because it was generally accepted that engineers ‘cannot write’.

He wanted to know what we thought would be the impact of computers on society. Mind you, this was around 1974 or 75, way before the pc was even invented; when our own computer programs were written in Fortran IV on punch cards fed into our faculty’s IBM1130.

Shy to say, my answer reflected my ignorance and lack of foresight. I said something to this effect. “This computer thing is nothing special. It’s just another of man’s many inventions; no different from the bow and arrows that our ancestors used.”

I will always remember Professor Morgan’s comment when my essay came back. “But this is something that is going to have a huge impact on our society. A time will come when the computer will impact practically every aspect of our lives.”

I think at that time, the wise professor himself did not realize just how accurate his prediction was.

Next time, I will share with you what Professon Goh Thong Ngee wrote in our graduation magazine .. if I can find it that is.

Footnote: Through the power of the computer that Professor Morgan spoke about, I learned that he has just passed away about 2 weeks ago at the age of 90. Read his obituary here.

Interesting Links:

1) IBM 1130
2) Punch Cards