Eat the Buddha : life and death in a Tibetan town

The Resource Eat the Buddha : life and death in a Tibetan town
Label
Eat the Buddha : life and death in a Tibetan town
Title remainder
life and death in a Tibetan town
Statement of responsibility
Barbara Demick
Creator
Contributor
Narrator
Subject
Genre
Language
eng
Summary
A gripping portrait of modern Tibet told through the lives of its people, from the bestselling author of Nothing to Envy. "You simply cannot understand China without reading Barbara Demick on Tibet."--Evan Osnos, author of Age of Ambition Just as she did with North Korea, award-winning journalist Barbara Demick explores one of the most hidden corners of the world. She tells the story of a Tibetan town perched eleven thousand feet above sea level that is one of the most difficult places in all of China for foreigners to visit. Ngaba was one of the first places where the Tibetans and the Chinese Communists encountered one another. In the 1930s, Mao Zedong's Red Army fled into the Tibetan plateau to escape their adversaries in the Chinese Civil War. By the time the soldiers reached Ngaba, they were so hungry that they looted monasteries and ate religious statues made of flour and butter--to Tibetans, it was as if they were eating the Buddha. Their experiences would make Ngaba one of the engines of Tibetan resistance for decades to come, culminating in shocking acts of self-immolation. Eat the Buddha spans decades of modern Tibetan and Chinese history, as told through the private lives of Demick's subjects, among them a princess whose family is wiped out during the Cultural Revolution, a young Tibetan nomad who becomes radicalized in the storied monastery of Kirti, an upwardly mobile entrepreneur who falls in love with a Chinese woman, a poet and intellectual who risks everything to voice his resistance, and a Tibetan schoolgirl forced to choose at an early age between her family and the elusive lure of Chinese money. All of them face the same dilemma: Do they resist the Chinese, or do they join them? Do they adhere to Buddhist teachings of compassion and nonviolence, or do they fight? Illuminating a culture that has long been romanticized by Westerners as deeply spiritual and peaceful, Demick reveals what it is really like to be a Tibetan in the twenty-first century, trying to preserve one's culture, faith, and language against the depredations of a seemingly unstoppable, technologically all-seeing superpower. Her depiction is nuanced, unvarnished, and at times shocking
Accompanying matter
technical information on music
Cataloging source
TEFOD
Dewey number
951/.38
Form of composition
not applicable
Format of music
not applicable
LC call number
DS797.77.A63
LC item number
D46 2020ab
Literary text for sound recordings
other
Music parts
not applicable
PerformerNote
Read by Cassandra Campbell
Transposition and arrangement
not applicable

Context

Context of Eat the Buddha : life and death in a Tibetan town

Work of

Structured data from the Bibframe namespace is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License by Deschutes Public Library. Additional terms may apply to data associated with third party namespaces.