"A Doctor in the House" : An Overview

So many books have been written about our former prime minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad by authentive and distingushed writters locally and abroad.
For instances, Paradoxes of Mahathirism: An Intellectual Biography of Mahathir Mohamad by our intellectual Khoo Boo Teik and Mahathir: A Profile in Courage by J. Victor Morais.
As such, the publishing of A Doctor in the House: The Memoirs of Tun Dr Mahamad Mohamad, should be welcomed although not timely viewing that he retired at 3pm on October 31, 2003, ample time for him to write such a memoir.
In his conclusion, Mahathir grateful to the people of Malaysia whose support had enabled him to led this, his beloved country, for 22 years.
He had tried his best although he cannot be a judge of his own work.
“As for me, I must admit that the greatest sastisfication that I get from seeing physical evidence of the success of the plans and policies which were formulated while I was PM,” he said.
He became the fourth PM of Malaysia after Tun Hussein Onn stepped down on July 16, 1981, on the ground of health.
For the scholar like Boo Teik: Mahathir is one of the Asia’s most successful politicians.
In a career spanning half of a century, he has been an occasional writer on Malay affairs, a doctor cum parliamentarian, a Malay nationalist who has emerged as as Third World spokeman, and a practitioner of Islamic modernism.
As a study of political ideology, Paradoxes of Mahathirism explores Mahathir’s ideas on nationalism, capitalism, Islam, populism, and authoritarianism – the core of Mahathirism.
On the other hand, Morais described Mahathir as a leader that represents a new generation of self-made and self-confident Malaysians.
Once labeled an ‘ultra’ and expelled from UMNO, Mahathir emerged from the political wilderness to become the fourth PM of Malaysia.
Almost more than three quarters of his memoirs are narrated on the setbacks and moments of glory after he resigned form the government to join politics, beside gives insight to his background and philosophy as PM of Malaysia.
As such, only the first 10 chapters of the Mahathir’s book can be considered as memoirs, by borrowing the definition given by H.L. Yelland and his friends:
“Recollection, a type of autobiography. They are distinguished from autobiography proper by amount of emphasis they place on events external to the writer’s own life.”
The Memoirs of Benvenuto Cellini, is an important and well known example of memoirs.
A Doctor in the House more suitable as an autobiography, because it gives a connected and systematic accout of the writer’s life, the formative influences in his development, his thoughts and actions, set against the background of his time.
Among other things, Mahathir devoted a chapter each to Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah (A House Divided : Team A and Team B), Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim (Anwar’s Challenge), and Lee KuanYew (Problems with Singapore), that to be reviewed next.