Customer Reviews

Malaysian Maverick: Mahathir Mohamad in Turbulent Times (Critical Studies of the Asia-Pacific)

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This is a good book about Mahathir. The main focus is on his time as a prime minister, but also includes chapters on his life before joining politics, his rise to power and his time after stepping down. The book is not organized in a strictly chronological way, but with one chapter for each major topic, such as Mahathir's 'vision of a modern nation', his economic policies, scandals, monarchy, foreign policy, his rivals etc. Very interesting was the chapter about the struggle over Mahathir's legacy and how things did not work out as he had expected after he stepped down. Some of the chapters are more about the particular topics than about Mahathir and often it is not even apparent what Mahathir's role was.
The author used to live in Malaysia and writes about Mahathir in a critical but unbiased way, neither lambasting him for his authoritarian tendencies nor just praising him for his achievements in socio-economic development. I recommend this book to anyone interested in Malaysia. It is suitable for people who have some knowledge of the country already, since it deals with Mahathir's political career in some depth, as well as people without much background, since it covers most of the most important issues in contemporary Malaysia.

22 years as Prime Minister of Malaysia made mistakes yes but modernized his Counrty into a manufacturing hub, annual average rate of growth of 6.5% is worthy of emulation by other third world leaders.He promted good values and attitudes favouring discipline over freedom.