Snapshots

American Investment banker and business executive Russell R. Miller shares several decades of diverse experience in Southeast Asia where he had a close-up view of sweeping changes in the economy and cultures of the region. Not content to merely be an observer of social change, Mr Miller works with government officials and Non-Governmental Organizations to encourage entrepreneurship and also tackles momentous events like the SARS epidemic. Lavishly illustrated with color photographs throughout, here is a front row seat to the continual transformation of Southeast Asia in the twenty-first century.

American Investment banker and business executive Russell R. Miller shares several decades of diverse experience in Southeast Asia where he had a close-up view of sweeping changes in the economy and cultures of the region. Not content to merely be an observer of social change, Mr Miller works with government officials and Non-Governmental Organizations to encourage entrepreneurship and also tackles momentous events like the SARS epidemic. Lavishly illustrated with color photographs throughout, here is a front row seat to the continual transformation of Southeast Asia in the twenty-first century. In Russell R. Miller's words: "This is not a travelogue or a diary of visits and adventures in Asia. If I could write as well as Somerset Maugham when he sketched his vivid impressions in On a Chinese Screen, I would do it. What follows are recollections of memorable moments and vivid people I have met in countries ranging from Japan to Indonesia. I have lived in some of these places, and others I just briefly passed through, but all have touched me in some deep way. Share the saunter, meet the people. It will change you."

Russell R. Miller is a native of San Francisco, California, and has been working on projects in Asia for almost thirty years. With headquarter offices in Hong Kong and Singapore, he directed two investment funds and in 2002 founded The Spirit of Enterprise, a nonprofit, cultural, educational organization dedicated to fostering the entrepreneurial spirit. Recently, he joined with others to start ZenPlay, a nonprofit aiming to help children’s charities. He also worked for three years in the U.S. Congress in Washington, D.C., and won a contested nomination for a U.S. Congressional seat, although he lost the general election. His papers for that period are found in the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, a principal repository library for California History. Prior to living in Singapore and now in Shanghai, he was an investment banker, having created a specialty firm in the United States that focused on the domestic and international insurance industry. He founded the National Insurance Leadership Symposium, a leadership forum for insurance executives. He served as a trustee and executive committee member of the College of Insurance, St. John’s University, in New York. He was a co-founder of the Insurance Industry Charitable Fund. A recipient of The Republic of Singapore’s Pingat Bakti Masyarakat Public Service Medal, he lives in both Shanghai and San Francisco.