Supremely readable analysis of Tibet’s history and place in the modern world, covering its relationships with China and the rest of the world (past and present – including the British invasion under Younghusband), and Patrick French‘s own exploration of the country and encounters with the people and the politics of Tibet in 1999.
On his return, he resigned his position as director of the Free Tibet Campaign.
Publisher’s webpage: Tibet, Tibet: A Personal History of a Lost Land – Patrick French
I read the first few pages of this a couple of years ago, on one of our Everest Get Together weekends in Pembrokeshire, and I finally got around to getting it out of the library.
Do No Harm continued to be an engrossing (and occasionally graphically gory) read. Fascinating first hand insights into what it is to be a brain surgeon working in the NHS at the end of the 20th century and early decades of the 21st: the frustrations and irritations, the triumphs and tragedies.
Henry Marsh explains neurological conditions, surgical procedures and accompanying medical terminology in day to day English, which makes these complex operations and the surgeons’ skills – technical and emotional – all the more admirable.
Publisher page: Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery – Henry Marsh
This name lodged in my brain from a 99 percent invisible (I think….) podcast advert, for the movie it’s been made into.
But don’t let that, or the cover and blurbs, put you off! The latter not do justice to the book’s research and the twin track quests it recounts – Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett‘s for the ancient civilisation(s) of the Amazon, the author’s for the expedition Fawcett led in 1925, and which never returned.
Fawcett’s previous explorations, surveying borders, rivers and routes through the Amazon in the 1910s and 1920s took place at the same time as more famous expeditions to the Poles and the Mallory-era attempts on Everest. Fawcett’s was a life similarly interrupted and irrevocably impacted by World War I, where he served as an officer on the Western Front.
A couple of interesting nuggets that I learned from the book were that:
One minor niggle, but one that kept resurfacing, were the American English references that always jar for the British English ear: ‘the London Times’, the ‘Mayfair district’, ‘jelly’ for jam, ‘X wrote Y’. Still, worth working though!
An array of travelling tales from authors better known for their fiction. Each short and sweet, and for the most part excellent reads, often looking back at an incident or experience early in the author’s life.
Publishers page: Better Than Fiction: True Travel from Great Fiction Writers – Don George (ed)
It took me a while to read my way through Caroline Moorehead’s biography of journalist, traveller and writer, Martha Gellhorn. Lots of detail to explore in an eventful life spanning almost 9 decades, ending in her suicide in 1998.
Always trying to share the impact of significant events on ordinary people, Martha Gellhorn wrote about the Great Depression in her home country of America, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, the Vietnam War, and much more.
Her own life was similarly eventful, living and travelling all around the globe, making friends (and losing them again) across continents.
Publisher’s page: Martha Gellhorn: A Life – Caroline Moorehead