05.08.08
NYRB: Thunder from Tibet
Thunder from Tibet
By Robert Barnett
The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama
by Pico Iyer
Knopf, 275 pp., $24.00
1.
Every so often, between the time a book leaves its publisher and the time it reaches its readers, events occur that change the ways it can be read. Such is the case with Pico Iyer’s account of the fourteenth Dalai Lama, the exiled leader of Tibet. The eruption of major protests in March in the former mountain kingdom has rendered Iyer’s gentle study of spirituality in the global age one that is less likely now to be seen as an inquiring portrait of a major thinker of our times than to be scanned for any sign of political prescience or treasured for the recollection of an innocence since lost. Few predicted the intensity of recent events inside Tibet, nor can anyone now be certain of their outcome