The moving biography of Thubten Jigme Norbu, an elder brother of the fourteenth Dalai Lama. Thubten Norbu recalls the details of his life: his childhood, his recognition as a reincarnated lama, the story of his brother, and the exile of thousands of Tibetans from their homeland. Thubten Norbu told his story (it was actually taped) to Heinrich Harrer who spent Seven Years in Tibet (Harrer's account appeared in 1954) and was the tutor to the Dalai Lama.

In My Tibetan Chldhood, Naktsang Nulo recalls his life in Tibet's Amdo region during the 1950s. From the perspective of himself at age ten, he describes his upbringing as a nomad on Tibet's eastern plateau. He depicts pilgrimages to monasteries, including a 1500-mile horseback expedition his family made to and from Lhasa. A year or so later, they attempted that same journey as they fled from advancing Chinese troops. Naktsang's father joined and was killed in the little-known 1958 Amdo rebellion against the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, the armed branch of the Chinese Communist Party. During the next year, the author and his brother were imprisoned in a camp where, after the onset of famine, very few children survived. The real significance of this episodic narrative is the way it shows, through the eyes of a child, the suppressed histories of China's invasion of Tibet. The author's matter-of-fact accounts cast the atrocities that he relays in stark relief. Remarkably, Naktsang lived to tell his tale. His book was published in 2007 in China, where it was a bestseller before the Chinese government banned it in 2010. It is the most reprinted modern Tibetan literary work. This translation makes a fascinating if painful period of modern Tibetan history accessible in English.

Jetsun Pema, the Dalai Lama's younger sister, offers a rare and poignant account of life in Tibet before the Chinese occupation--a world that is lost forever. She presents her story from her childhood, growing up in pre-invasion Tibet, to her work today as a minister of the Tibetan government. These courageous and moving words are an enduring testament to the indomitability of the human spirit. photo insert.

In October 1943 a small group of Mongolian pilgrims set off westward from Inner Mongolia. Before them lay a confused battleground where the Japanese and rival armies of Chinese and Mongolians fought over the fate of Central Asia. Among the pilgrims was a young monk named Dawa Sangpo beginning what was probably the greatest travel adventure undertaken by anyone of his nationality in this century; for he was not Mongolian at all, but an enterprising Japanese named Hisao Kimura.

Defying everyone+s advice, armed only with her rudimentary knowledge of Chinese and Tibetan, Sabriye Tenberken set out to do something about the appalling condition of the Tibetan blind, who she learned had been abandoned by society and left to die. Traveling on horseback throughout the country, she sought them out, devised a Braille alphabet in Tibetan, equipped her charges with canes for the first time, and set up a school for the blind. Her efforts were crowned with such success that hundreds of young blind Tibetans, instilled with a newfound pride and an education, have now become self-supporting. A tale that will leave no reader unmoved, it demonstrates anew the power of the positive spirit to overcome the most daunting odds.