Himalaya

November 2, 2020
Extreme landscapes, vibrant cultures, and tumultuous politics animate this sweeping history of the Himalayan region. Journalist Douglas (Tenzing: Hero of Everest) surveys the dazzling geology and ecology of the world’s highest mountain range and the unique civilizations it fostered, which produced a flowering of Buddhist philosophy, art, and architecture during Tibet’s medieval glory days. He also probes the tectonic geopolitical forces that molded Tibet and Nepal as they confronted powerful neighbors in China and British India and then diverged in the post-WWII era, with Tibet succumbing to Chinese colonization while Nepal struggled through monarchical dictatorships and Maoist insurgency to become a democracy and tourist mecca. It’s a colorful story, full of bloody palace intrigues in Kathmandu and Lhasa and nervy exploits by the many foreign (primarily British) outsiders drawn to the region—merchants, missionaries, cartographers, and, above all, mountaineers, whose conquests of Himalayan peaks Douglas recounts in vivid detail. Providing a corrective to romantic Western stereotypes of the region as the homeland of spiritual purity, Douglas notes the allure of Himalayan cultures but is clear-eyed about the prosaic economic motives that shape life there. Written in elegant prose with sharply etched profiles of historical figures, this engrossing account offers a fresh, revealing portrait of a much-mythologized place. Photos.

January 1, 2021

Instead of concentrating on a single country, the entire Himalaya region is covered in this latest work by award-winning writer Douglas, with a focus on Tibet and Nepal and secondarily, Bhutan. Most of the history is drawn from European sources and viewpoints, first from missionaries and traders, followed by East India Company and British officials, and expanding to include some local sources closer to present day. Nonetheless, a comprehensive outsiders' view of tribal and royal intrigue is explored in detail, often to dizzying effect given the vast locations, time, and number of individuals involved. Nearly half the book covers history until the mid-1900s, with the current era, including the impact of mountaineering, rounding it out. Sections highlighting geography, botany, and natural history add further context. Douglas helpfully includes details of how Buddhism gained prominence in the region, the influence of trade routes, and how the tectonic forces that created the world's tallest mountain shaped events as much as the two regional superpowers, China and India, with an invasive and oversized role played by the East India Company and Britain. VERDICT For readers interested in a detailed, wide-ranging overview of the history and people of the Himalaya in relation to outside influences.--Zebulin Evelhoch, Deschutes P.L., OR

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from November 1, 2020
Robust history of the vast South Asian mountain range and its hold on the imagination. British mountaineering writer Douglas, who has visited the region more than 40 times, has obviously combed through several libraries' worth of material on all things related to the Abode of Snow, as the Sanskrit word Himalayas translates. Certainly he has found hitherto obscure connections--for one, the central place of explorers who would later turn out to be Nazis, such as Bruno Beger, a German anthropologist who merrily took skull measurements of the people he encountered and considered the Tibetan aristocracy to demonstrate "evidence of a common Aryan ancestor" and progenitors of the German people. "The murderous racial theories of the Third Reich meant about as much in prewar Lhasa as Hollywood's version of Shangri-La, or the fertile imaginings of the Theosophists," writes Douglas. "These were simply orientalist fantasies projected onto the Himalaya." Many other fantasies come into play in his lucid account, sometimes held by local people--the Dalai Lama two incarnations ago who harbored a dream of making Tibet a pan-Asian stronghold against China--and sometimes by outsiders, such as the Arizona-born flimflam man Theos Bernard, who bothered people with his "intrusive photography" and was murdered. Numerous Europeans came to the Himalayas, Douglas chronicles, in an attempt to spread Christianity to people already steeped in religion, and many of those Europeans came away with an intense interest in Buddhism, hastening its spread globally. Others didn't quite get the message; Douglas writes dismissively of "the self-absorbed ramblings of Helena Blavatsky," whose Theosophy was theoretically grounded in Tibetan Buddhism but was instead a garbled mess. Many well-known figures populate these pages, including British administrator and linguist William Jones, who, well before accurate measurements were secured, figured out that the Himalayas were the world's tallest mountains, "without excepting the Andes." A towering addition to any geography or mountaineering buff's library.

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