The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 7 February 2005
edited by James O'Reilly & Larry Habegger
This is another in the excellent Travelers' Tales series which includes many books containing personal and historical travel accounts of many places around the globe. Here are compiled 27 short pieces about travel in the forbidden land of Tibet (forbidden once by its own insularity, forbidden now by the People's Liberation Army). They range from an excerpt from Heinrich Harrer's famous Seven Years in Tibet to Alexandra David-Neel's approach to Lhasa, to lesser-known essays relating recent trips into this exotic, politically shattered land by authors such as Pico Iyer, Jeff Greenwald, and Wade Davis. While other books in the Travelers' Tales series have a more enticing tone for the armchair traveler, this one is, by necessity, steeped in the political and human rights trouble in which Tibet has been buried. Many of the stories are adventures in an almost clandestine form of travel. They relate the shadowy world of the black market in materials and ideals. Others tell the story of the surviving fragments of Tibet's culture, in passages that are as moving as they are troubling. Still other stories have the youthful exuberance of traveling in a strange and harsh environment among friendly people. One can not read these, however, without the acknowledgment that in other ways, the country has been broken. There is an immediate tone to the book, which gives it relevance and life. Many of the stories are excerpts from longer pieces, and the bibliography is a good jumping-off point for further reading. If one is traveling to Tibet, or just dreaming about it, one could hardly do better than this book.