Amazon.com
As a way of disposing of corpses in a climate that hampers decomposition, the Tibetans have a custom of taking corpses to a sacred place, breaking up the bones, chopping away the flesh, and leaving it all for vultures to clean up. This is called "sky burial," and as a metaphor for the plight of the Tibetan people, it couldn't be more apt--something Blake Kerr, a doctor fresh out of medical school, discovered by accident. During an innocent visit to Shangri-La, Kerr suddenly found himself treating the wounds of people beaten and shot during the largest riot in Tibet in almost 30 years.
Kerr and his mountaineering buddy John Ackerly start out as typical brazen adventurers. Through several happenstance contacts in Lhasa, however, they are introduced to the lives of Tibetans under communist occupation. What they see is disturbing. Gradually, their sympathies turn toward Tibet and ours toward them. When the riot breaks out, they risk life and limb to chronicle atrocities and assist the wounded. For weeks after, they engage in clandestine operations of assistance. And for years after, they work to bring the oppression, suffering, torture, murder, and forced sterilization of a helpless people to worldwide awareness. Part rollicking travel story, part investigative journalism, Sky Burial is finally a testament and will leave you staring blankly, wondering what can be done. --Brian Bruya
From Publishers Weekly
In 1987, Kerr, a young physician, and his friend John Ackerly, a lawyer, went to Tibet on an unabashedly larky jaunt in search of adventure. After impetuously hiking 22,000 feet on Chomohunga in sneakers, they were in Lhasa when a small group of Buddhist monks appeared chanting "China out of Tibet." Huge crowds gathered; the monks were arrested by Chinese police, some were rumored to have been beaten or shot and there was bloodshed in the now rioting crowd. Kerr and Ackerly were so deeply affected by the violence and by other evidence of Chinese repression of the Tibetans that they became activists in the cause of Tibetan independence. A year later, Kerr returned to document population control measures imposed by the Chinese on the Tibetans. He visited hospitals, observed several abortions and talked--sometimes in sign language, occasionally with the help of an interpreter--with doctors and patients, who described China's two-child limit, one-child-preferred population policies and the grossly unsanitary conditions of medical procedures. The small number of Tibetan voices, eccentric circumstances and emotional reporting detract from the impact of this part antic travelogue, part serious polemic. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Upon completing medical studies in 1987, Kerr persuaded a Dartmouth undergraduate friend to accompany him to Tibet. The first third of this well-written book describes their travels in Tibet as backpackers and concludes with an account of their briefly joining an American expedition on the north face of Mount Everest. Then Kerr recounts his being caught in the mass rioting in Lhasa in October 1987; he was detained, and his visa was canceled. Upon leaving Tibet, Kerr went to India, where he met with the Dalai Lama and Tibetan groups to describe what he saw in Lhasa. Kerr concludes with his return to China and Tibet, where he informally surveyed population control practices ranging from abortions to mass sterilizations. Kerr's masterful prose makes it hard to put the book down, and what he describes certainly needs to reach a wide audience.- Donald Clay Johnson, Univ. of Minnesota Lib., MinneapolisCopyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
The sky burial is the ancient Tibetan ceremony in which a corpse, hacked to pieces, is left on a mountainside to be eaten by vultures. It's also Kerr's metaphor for Tibet's plundering by China, which--as detailed in this adventure story with teeth--he saw firsthand when his lark of a Himalayan mountain-climbing spree turned unexpectedly bloody. In 1987, the author, a young physician, traveled with his old Dartmouth pal John Ackerly, a lawyer, to Tibet by way of China in order to ``climb as high as we could on the Tibetan side of Everest.'' Despite a few ominous foreshadowings--the ``thunder'' they heard upon first glimpsing Lhasa's Potola Palace, ancestral home of the Dalai Lamas, turned out to be Chinese artillery--the pair's early days in Tibet (and the first third of this account) were devoted to adventure, as they tackled Everest in madcap style, wearing sneakers but making it all the way up to Camp Three (of Six) despite nasty brushes with altitude sickness. But back in the streets of Lhasa--streets dirtied by raw sewage and prowled by mongrel dogs (whom the Tibetans believe to be reincarnated monks- gone-astray)--the adventure turned dangerous when, on October 1, Chinese National Day, Tibetans amassed in protest against the Chinese occupation and were fired upon by Chinese police, who killed several. Swept up, Kerr threw stones at cops, then went into hiding, tending wounded Tibetans and collecting stories of Chinese torture and forced sterilization of Tibetans. With Ackerly, he then traveled south to India, where he met with the Dalai Lama, who told him that ``the Chinese are wonderful people. It is their government that makes trouble.'' Kerr's account ends with his 1991 return to Tibet, where he found conditions still ``bleak,'' the Chinese occupation ``having a genocide effect on the Tibetans.'' A potent blend of high adventure and moral polemic, and yet further testimony to the ongoing tragedy of Shangri-La. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Book Description
Riveting firsthand account by a U.S. doctor of the recent turmoil in Tibet.
Home
