Book Commentary
May 23, 2002
By Michael
This book on Tibet came in last January, and it's big and beautiful and I don't know how I managed to overlook it. Tibet: Journey to the Forbidden City, Retracing the Footsteps of Alexandra David-Neel may have an unwieldy title but the photos are awesome (a number of them double-pages) and the conceit intriguing; David-Neel was born in Paris in 1868, travelled and was taught extensively in Tibet; we have a number of her works here, under Buddhism or Travel. Or both. So these two (the authors) took the trouble to journey to Tibet seventy years after David-Neel, a journey in both space and time, so to speak.
Have you ever been to Los Angeles? Maybe you live there. I have a sister in Long Beach but she insists that's not L.A., not really. If you haven't to either, Mike Davis' City of Quartz is a good introduction to the place. It came out in '90 so it's a little dated but not that much and as its focus is on social history and architecture it's still relevant. A city of extremes, of conspiracies (perhaps against the rest of the United Snakes).
We did get a slew of those old Reader's Union hardcovers the other day. I do so love them: nicely constructed, of a handy size and principally on history and travel, two subjects admittedly close to my heart. Reader's Union was a sort of higher-quality book-club, back in the '60's and '70's, from Britain. One in particular, Peter Levi's The Light Garden of the Angel King, Journeys to Afghanistan, is timely and relatively scarce. Levi was a classical scholar and poet; the photography by Bruce Chatwin. The original edition was published by Collins. I wonder what it looked like.
I was rummaging through a car-load of what looked like mostly book-club fiction and found in its midst a first-edition of Cecelia Holland's third book: The Kings in Winter. Are you familiar with Holland? She's been published for over thirty years now and still going strong, writing historical fiction in a clean, spare prose. Her first half-dozen or so were published by Atheneum and very attractively designed by Harry Ford. If you haven't read Holland yet, you can do well by picking up a recent work of hers: Jerusalem, set in Palestine before the Third Crusade.
Speaking of history (am I speaking?) what came in the other day but a volume from Hans Delbruck's venerable old History of the Art of War: The Barbarian Invasions. It originally came out in the 1920's but still remains fresh and relevant today. The good professor had an endearing habit of puncturing old historical myths, such as the moral-decline theory of Rome's fall. This edition even has a wonderfully cheesy nineteenth-century illustration on the front cover. Unfortunately the book, a trade paperback, isn't sewn in quires. In a university press, you would think they would go to the expense of properly binding such a book. Oh well.
Tibet, Journey to the Forbidden City, Retracing the Steps of Alexandra David-Neel by Tiziana and Gianni Baldizzone. Stewart, Tabori and Chang, New York, 1996. $30.
City of Quartz by Mike Davis. Vintage, New York, 1992. $10.
The Light Garden of the Angel King: Journeys to Afghanistan by Peter Levi. Reader's Union, Newton Abbot, 1973. $20.
The Kings in Winter by Cecelia Holland. Atheneum, New York, 1968. First Edition. $35.
The Barbarian Invasions (History of the Art of War volume two) by Hans Delbruck. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1990. $20.