Category: book reviews
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Review: “Radio Shangri-la: What I Learned in Bhutan, the Happiest Kingdom on Earth”
“Yet if Akon and Christina Aguilera could dominate the airwaves—if cupcakes were being baked and Coca-Cola swigged and a person like me had been allowed in—anything was possible.” I almost didn’t make it through the preface of this book. There are far too many white-woman-having-a-midlife-crisis-and-deciding-to-travel-around-the-globe memoirs out there, and this one certainly doesn’t start off…
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Review: “The Lowland”
Lahiri’s strong suit is place. Descriptions of Kolkata trickle into my mind and I can see those dusty corners of India where the situations written about in the book could’ve taken place, and the small “lowland” of my own that I came to cherish and be so complexed by. The house I was staying at…
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Review: “Kosher Chinese”
“I held the ball and took a deep breath. The trip to the game had included a teammate crapping in a bag; my cheering section included a girl from a tiny village forced to go to work at age twelve; my team nickname was Friendship Jew. But the hoop was still ten feet high. A…
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Review: “Out of This World: Across the Himalayas to Forbidden Tibet”
Out of This World: Across the Himalayas to Forbidden Tibet (Lowell Thomas, Jr.) In 1949, the government of Tibet gave permission to Lowell Thomas, the broadcaster who made Lawrence of Arabia famous, and his son, the author of this book, to travel to Lhasa. Lhasa, the holiest city in all of Tibet, was off-limits to…
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Review: “Sky Train: Tibetan Women on the Edge of History”
Sky Train: Tibetan Women on the Edge of History (Canyon Sam) Tibet is the “roof of the world” that teeters dangerously close to falling off the global map, despite the protests of March 2008, the 50th anniversary of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama’s escape into India, and the “splittist” activities all throughout China that…
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Review: “Waiting for the Dalai Lama: Stories from All Sides of the Tibetan Debate”
“‘It’s better if the Dalai Lama doesn’t come back. Now he is working for Tibet’s independence, and he can only do this abroad. Here he would be put away in a monastery somewhere. It could even be dangerous…. I think that the situation in Tibet won’t change until China changes. As soon as they become…
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