Thursday, November 10, 2016

Top ten books about the Himalayas

Robert Twigger's books include White Mountain: Real and Imagined Journeys in the Himalayas. One of his ten top books about the Himalayas, as shared at the Guardian:
Seven Years in Tibet by Heinrich Harrer

This is such a strange book, even if, on the surface it presents a kind of attractive peasant naivety. It tells of Harrer’s escape from a British PoW camp in India near the end of the second world war. (He knew Germany had lost, so escaping was an existential choice rather than a practical one.) He went over the Himalayas and into Tibet, which was very much a closed country at the time. The adventures and indignities that Harrer suffers makes his book great reading, and it just gets better and better when he meets the current Dalai Lama, then a teenager, and becomes his teacher.
Read about another book on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue