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Mr. Lee's memoirs first narrates how his team took the reins and built Singapore from scratch when the city-state was expelled from Malaysia in mid-1960s. His team was organized in crafting policies, such as targeting investments and building up key high-tech manufacturing industries, building up their defense capabilities, devising an efficient health care and housing system, promoting tourism through building up airport infrastructure and nurturing its national airline, improving tertiary education and language fluency of its students, to greening Singapore. All while Singapore faced racial clashes and riots, and the threat of communism in Southeast Asia.

But what is more interesting is his intuitive telling of the history and developments in Asia, Europe and the US in the 1950s-90s through interesting anecdotes of his interactions with the countries' leaders that time. His anecdotes on Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, Suharto of Indonesia, Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping of China, Jawaharlal Nehru of India, and the Vietnamese guerrilla leaders after the war are my favorites.

His main thesis in his memoir is that East and Southeast Asia were able to develop their economies during that period because of the security blanket of the Western forces checking the spread of Soviet and Chinese communism in the region. Also an interesting discovery I had is that one of the reason why ASEAN was formed is to unite the original five member states against the threat of communism in the region. And now ASEAN is the largest economic cooperation in the developing world.

I have learned much from Asian history from Mr. Lee's memoir. He has an intuitive assessment of the challenges of the countries he visited. This is a must-read book for students interested in public policy, from an Asian development perspective.