daughter in the care of nuns after the child’s father, a senior Falintil leader, refused to fully recognise her birth. Another sharply etched tale follows a member of the United Nations Mission in East Timor (UNAMET) staff back to the Maliana police station, site of a terrible massacre by militia days after referendum results were announced, to look for the remains of her husband’s body. Though Cristalis makes clear the role played by Indonesian security forces in driving, and directly participating in, militia violence, she also gives life to members of the Indonesian security apparatus whose motivations are more confused: either out of fear or moral disgust. If this approach provides a history anchored in a set of personal experiences, it sometimes struggles to comprehensively record the broader context. Where it seeks to fill in lengthy background around events where the author was not present, such as the first 20 years of resistance, or the period of United Nations (UN) transitional administration, Cristalis’s account inevitably feels thinner, and might have benefited from broader sources. Where a narrow focus includes her own experience, however, it sometimes offers a richer account than a more comprehensive telling. Cristalis was one of three foreign journalists who chose not to evacuate from the UN compound in the bloody days following the referendum announcement, amid disagreement over whether a group of hundreds of Timorese refugees gathered in the compound would accompany them. This is a period related many times elsewhere by those involved in the cables to and from New York, but Cristalis’s view is closer to those with whom she is sharing the crowded floor: confusion over how any option other than full evacuation could be considered. This second edition has been updated with chapters that take up the lives of sev- eral characters following independence. These offer a reasonable guide to major devel- opments in the country, including the 2006 crisis and the shooting of the president in 2008, but again the material is thinner; several of Cristalis’s friends have left. The rest of the work has, however, come into sharper focus with a revision; the characters and their motivations and frustrations have been given more space at the expense of the journalist’s gloss. CILLIAN NOLAN International Crisis Group, Dili Malaysia Across the causeway: A multi-dimensional study of Malaysia–Singapore relations Edited by TAKASHI SHIRAISHI Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2009. Pp. 265, Index. doi:10.1017/S0022463410000664 This book addresses a set of issues that must be resolved by Singapore and Malaysia in order to overcome the challenges that are bedevilling relations across the causeway. The book’s clear strength lies in its multidisciplinary approach and includes 15 contributions by historians, political scientists and economists. BOOK REVIEWS 179