RIFLE RANGE BOY

Parliament, Unexpected Tan Sri Ariff Yusof This book is more like a report card on the activities of the Speaker who was appointed to the helm when the new Pakatan Harapan coalition government was elected. The government was short-lived with its own appointment premier sabotaging his own partners in what came to be known as the Sheraton move. Mahathir Mohammad was never happy with the unsettlingly high participation of opposition members in the new government. A bigoted racist by mindset, from the get-go, he had been devising a way to get his former party UMNO back to power without Najib and his band of thieves. Maybe by design or double-crossing, Mahathir got ousted instead. What remains now is a sleuth of incompetent clowns who dance around in their self aggrandising Emperor's New Clothes. Hyenas and jackals have all come out to play in a system that borders on lawlessness day by day. He gives a brief account of his childhood days, his alma mater, his family, and his career and d...

My Story: Justice in The Wilderness Author: Tommy Thomas. This book has generated so much publicity, even from people who have not managed to read it. Its sales have soared tremendously, selling off the shelves like hotcakes and has gone into multiple reprints in such a short time. The speed at which police reports were registered almost days after the book's release exposed Malaysian readers' voraciousness.  Whether these people actually read the book is another question altogether. Over the years, Malaysians have realised that rumours carry more weightage than the official narrative. Coffee-shop talks invariably turn up to be accurate, despite all denials. This book just affirms all of the above. In my opinion, this book can be described as a logbook of a person who had completed his tour de force which he considered a national service for his country. He was given a mandate by the people to perform a task, and this is his way of saying this is what he did and what he failed...

High Noon (1952) When John Wayne was offered the role of the protagonist, he declined on the basis that there were many political connotations in its storyline. It was at the heights of McCarthyism and witch-hunt against card-carrying members of the Red Communist Party was ongoing. The screenwriter and producer, Carl Foreman, was involved in this; he subsequently migrated the UK after the film completion. Many iconic figures, including Charlie Chaplin, were blacklisted and lost their source of income during this time. For a Malaysian who is watching this movie after GE14, it resonates at a different level. I see a lot of parallelism in the storyline with the occurrences around the country. It does not need much imagination; a retired law enforcer returning to do one last unfinished business of a duty related to his tenure before he rides into the sunset. Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly Marshall Kane marries a Quaker lady, a pacifist, just before turning in the badge to lead a civi...