Eat The Buddha

The method is programmatic openness, deep listening, a willingness to be waylaid; the effect, a prismatic picture of history as experienced and understood by individuals in their full amplitude and idiosyncrasy… more

Superb new book by the Samuel Johnson prize-winning author of Nothing to Envy… more

Vibrant, often heartbreaking… Memorable voices inform a penetrating, absorbing history.… more

Barbara Demick has pieced together not only the reality but the soul of a place, weaving together individual stories with all their contradictions and complexity… ordinary people desperately trying to adapt or resist to avoid being destroyed by the forces of history… more

Barbara Demick’s new book is essential reading for anyone interested in China and Tibet. The reporting is rich, the writing is beautiful, and the stories will stay with you. I couldn’t put it down.… more

Deeply and meticulously researched, Eat the Buddha tells the story of the beautiful area of eastern Tibet, land of the fabled Mei kingdom, where the Tibetan people have thrived in a majestic environment for several millennia, only to suffer horrifically in the last seventy years with the invasion an… more

Barbara Demick has produced an elegiac narrative of a frontier town that is a hotbed of resistance on the Tibetan plateau. With novelistic depth and through characteristically painstaking research, Demick offers a poignant reminder of the enduring power of memory to illuminate untold histories. Eat… more

You simply cannot understand China without reading Barbara Demick on Tibet. Her work is fair-minded, chilling, awe-inspiringly rigorous, and as vivid as cinema. Eat the Buddha is a warning to anyone who tries to analyze China through its cities: You will misread the future if you overlook the war ov… more