Tibet’s Last Stand? The Tibetan Uprising of 2008 and China’s Response

This deeply knowledgeable book offers the first sustained analysis of the 2008 uprising in Tibet, which revealed much about Tibetan nationalism and even more about Chinese nationalism. Retracing the complex history between China and Tibet, noted expert Warren Smith describes the uprising itself and explores its broader significance for Chinese-Tibetan relations. He sharply critiques China’s use of heavy-handed propaganda to recast the uprising and obscure its origins and significance. The book convincingly shows that far from becoming more lenient in response to Tibetan discontent, China has determined to eradicate Tibetan opposition internally and coerce the international community to conform to China’s version of Tibetan history and reality.

Reviews

Tibet’s Last Stand? is the first book-length discussion of the 150 or so protests that took place in Tibet in 2008. Using clear, accessible language, Warren Smith offers a detailed summary of the protests that took place and especially of the responses of the security forces and politicians to unrest, together with extensive ethical and political commentaries by the author. –Robert J. Barnett, Columbia University

A lucid, comprehensive, and insightful account of the 2008 uprising in Tibet. Smith’s impressive analysis of the causes of the uprising is surpassed only by his detailed examination of the consequences of that eruption: the resurgence of Tibetan nationalism, the brutal Chinese crackdown and the collapse of the Dalai Lama’s negotiation attempts with Beijing. It is a must read for those concerned about the fate of Tibet. The book takes on special significance in the wake of the similar conflict in Xinjiang in 2009, providing useful insight into the future of China’s colonial empire. –Jamyang Norbu, author of The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes

Warren W. Smith Jr. has emerged as the preeminent writer on Tibetan history and Sino-Tibetan relations. His newest work solidifies that position by offering the most comprehensive account available of Tibet’s resistance during the buildup to the Beijing Olympics–an uprising that challenged China’s claim that it has a legitimate right to colonize and suppress the Tibetan people. Smith relates Beijing’s paranoid reaction to the uprising in fascinating detail. Anyone who is interested in the Tibetan issue or the nature of modern Chinese nationalism must read Tibet’s Last Stand?, a seminal and mesmerizing book. –Mikel Dunham, author of Buddha’s Warriors

“The most informative and fair account available of China’s occupation of Tibet and its consequences. . . . Open-minded readers of whatever opinion about China and Tibet will find much to learn from Tibet’s Last Stand, and may even change their minds. . . . This is a revealing and honest book. . . . Tibetans are unlikely ever to achieve their independence, Dr. Smith concludes, `but they retain the right to write their own history.’ This he says–and he is a great champion–must be the role of Tibetans in exile and their friends. . . . I believe that will be the judgment of many attentive readers of this invaluable book.” –Hong Kong Economic Journal

“A useful, detailed account of the 2008 demonstrations, the official response, and surrounding events. . . . Readers will gain a clear idea of the Chinese position on Tibet and of Beijing’s strategy in the region: a combination of Han immigration, economic development, assimilation, repression, and waiting for the Dalai Lama to die.” –Foreign Affairs

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by Warren W. Smith Jr.

Anyone who is a Tibet activist, a serious student of Tibetan Buddhism, or a history buff will find Smith’s book indispensable. What is truly fresh and original in China’s Tibet?–and reveals Smith at his most penetrating and disturbing– is his analysis of China’s greatest propaganda successes. The tug of war between recorded fact and historical revisionism, autonomy and assimilation, Tibetan Buddhist culture and Chinese real estate, will continue while the rest of the world looks on from the sidelines. In the meantime, we should be very grateful that Warren Smith has kept a superb scorecard for us.

Reviews

Smith has extensive living experience in the region and does his research with great care….Recommended. –Choice, November 2008

This is a landmark study of China’s efforts to fully subsume Tibet and to rewrite Tibetan history to conform to this official reality. Smith’s dispassionate, critical, and detailed account makes clear China’s goal of complete assimilation and the futility of the Dalai Lama’s policy to seek some kind of ‘meaningful autonomy’ for his country. –Jamyang Norbu, author of The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes

“In seven fluid chapters, the book covers recent Tibetan history, with an emphasis on Chinese propaganda and how Chinese leaders have viewed Tibet. . . . China’s Tibet?is essential for understanding how the Sino-Tibetan relationship became what it is today. . . . His clear-eyed analysis makes a very convincing case.” –Far Eastern Economic Review

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by Isabel Hilton

While working on a documentary film, British journalist Hilton was permitted to accompany the Dalai Lama as he sought to identify the 11th incarnation of the Panchen Lama, the second-highest spiritual authority of Tibet’s ruling Buddhist sect. This excellent and artfully written book (part of which has appeared in the New Yorker) tells the complicated recent history of the Panchen Lama.

The 10th incarnation died under mysterious circumstances in 1989 and is considered by many Tibetans to have been a traitor. The 11th–still a child–is missing; the six-year-old boy was detained along with his family in the mid-’90s by Tibet’s Chinese rulers and has not been heard from since. Meanwhile, the Chinese authorities have offered another child as the spiritual leader incarnate.

Although she reveals the end of the story in the early pages of the book, Hilton relates this history with great drama and subtle wryness (for Westerners, she says, Tibet is “a kind of religious Disneyland”). Her wonderfully detailed writing illustrates the spiritual and political contours of these events. She describes, for example, a group of Tibetan lamas’ two-day journey to Lhamo Latso Lake, where they went to gain insight that helped them find the reincarnated Panchen Lama; their trek, which involved 20 yaks, a video camera and a set of binoculars, was also monitored closely by Chinese spies.

Hilton reports the story of the quest with great skill, weaving the history of Tibet with visits to monasteries in Tibet, China and India and conveying the power of a religion to survive the destruction of its institutions, the imposition of martial law, jailings and death in labor camps and prisons.

Reviews

An excellent primer on Tibetan history and ….a chilling picture of the brutality of Chinese repression in Tibet. – Wall Street Journal

Lively and vastly entertaining…. Hilton has seen—and participated in—one of the final moments of a lost Tibet. – Boston Sunday Globe

Riveting ….captures the panoramic scope of a remarkable story…. The ending is heartbreaking. – Los Angeles Times

[A]n outstanding book, well-researched, lively, scholarly, humorous, sympathetic, and eminently readable. – The Tablet, 18 September 1999

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The author, vice president of the Poynter Institute School of Journalism, wants you to understand that a tool isn’t the same thing as a rule. A tool is something designed to help you, not constrict you. The 50 tools discussed here take writers through the process of storytelling in prose, from the basic (construct a sentence with a subject and a verb) to the advanced (make your characters archetypes, not stereotypes).

Many of Clark’s rules are technical, having to do with such matters as punctuation and tense, but some of them are more thematically oriented (for example, discussions of the proper uses of foreshadowing and suspense). Use the tools when you like, the author says, and throw them away when it suits you. Just know what it is you’re throwing away and why. This is a useful tool for writers at all levels of experience, and it’s entertainingly written, with plenty of helpful examples. David Pitt

Levine, best known for Ella Enchanted (1997), offers middle-graders ideas about making their own writing take flight. Though her concentration is primarily fiction, she notes that her suggestions can help all sorts of writing. Among the topics she covers are shaping characters, beginnings and endings, revising, and finding ideas.

But the best part of Levine’s book is her honesty as she shares with children the truth that there are no perfect books, that rejection can be as useful as success, and that you thank the creative part of you by using the ideas that it sends. She even dips into the details of getting published, which will inspire the most serious in the audience.

Each chapter concludes with writing exercises, some surprisingly inviting, all of which end with the injunctions: “Have fun” and “Save what you write.” A terrific item to have on hand for writing groups or for individual young writers who want to improve. Ilene Cooper

Short and snappy as it is, Stephen King’s On Writing really contains two books: a fondly sardonic autobiography and a tough-love lesson for aspiring novelists. The memoir is terrific stuff, a vivid description of how a writer grew out of a misbehaving kid. You’re right there with the young author as he’s tormented by poison ivy, gas-passing babysitters, uptight schoolmarms, and a laundry job nastier than Jack London’s. It’s a ripping yarn that casts a sharp light on his fiction. This was a child who dug Yvette Vickers from Attack of the Giant Leeches, not Sandra Dee. “I wanted monsters that ate whole cities, radioactive corpses that came out of the ocean and ate surfers, and girls in black bras who looked like trailer trash.”

But massive reading on all literary levels was a craving just as crucial, and soon King was the published author of “I Was a Teen-Age Graverobber.” As a young adult raising a family in a trailer, King started a story inspired by his stint as a janitor cleaning a high-school girls locker room. He crumpled it up, but his writer wife retrieved it from the trash, and using her advice about the girl milieu and his own memories of two reviled teenage classmates who died young, he came up with Carrie. King gives us lots of revelations about his life and work. The kidnapper character in Misery, the mind-possessing monsters in The Tommyknockers, and the haunting of the blocked writer in The Shining symbolized his cocaine and booze addiction (overcome thanks to his wife’s intervention, which he describes). “There’s one novel, Cujo, that I barely remember writing.”

King also evokes his college days and his recovery from the van crash that nearly killed him, but the focus is always on what it all means to the craft. He gives you a whole writer’s “tool kit”: a reading list, writing assignments, a corrected story, and nuts-and-bolts advice on dollars and cents, plot and character, the basic building block of the paragraph, and literary models. He shows what you can learn from H.P. Lovecraft’s arcane vocabulary, Hemingway’s leanness, Grisham’s authenticity, Richard Dooling’s artful obscenity, Jonathan Kellerman’s sentence fragments. He explains why Hart’s War is a great story marred by a tin ear for dialogue, and how Elmore Leonard’s Be Cool could be the antidote.

King isn’t just a writer, he’s a true teacher. –Tim Appelo

If you suffer about your relationship with food — you eat too much or too little, think about what you will eat constantly or try not to think about it at all — you can be free. Just look down at your plate. The answers are there. Don’t run. Look. Because when we welcome what we most want to avoid, we contact the part of ourselves that is fresh and alive. We touch the life we truly want and evoke divinity itself.

Since adolescence, Geneen Roth has gained and lost more than a thousand pounds. She has been dangerously overweight and dangerously underweight. She has been plagued by feelings of shame and self-hatred and she has felt euphoric after losing a quick few pounds on a fad diet. Then one day, on the verge of suicide, she did something radical: She dropped the struggle, ended the war, stopped trying to fix, deprive and shame herself. She began trusting her body and questioning her beliefs.

It worked. And losing weight was only the beginning.

She wrote about her discoveries in When Food Is Love, her first New York Times bestseller. She gave huge numbers of women their first insights into compulsive eating and she changed huge numbers of lives for the better.

Now, after more than three decades of studying, teaching and writing about what drives our compul-sions with food, Geneen adds a profound new dimension to her work in Women, Food and God. She begins with her most basic concept: The way you eat is inseparable from your core beliefs about being alive. Your relationship with food is an exact mirror of your feelings about love, fear, anger, meaning, transformation and, yes, even God. But it doesn’t stop there. Geneen shows how going beyond both the food and feelings takes you deeper into realms of spirit and soul to the bright center of your own life.

With penetrating insight and irreverent humor, Roth traces food compulsions from subtle beginnings to unexpected ends. She teaches personal examination, showing readers how to use their relationship with food to discover the fulfillment they long for.

Your relationship with food, no matter how conflicted, is the doorway to freedom, says Roth. What you most want to get rid of is itself the doorway to what you want most: the demystification of weight loss and the luminous presence that so many of us call “God.”

Packed with revelations on every page, this book is a knock-your-socks-off ride to a deeply fulfilling relationship with food, your body…and almost everything else. Women, Food and God is, quite simply, a guide for life.

A brilliant account—character-rich and darkly humorous—of how the U.S. economy was driven over the cliff. When the crash of the U. S. stock market became public knowledge in the fall of 2008, it was already old news. The real crash, the silent crash, had taken place over the previous year, in bizarre feeder markets where the sun doesn’t shine, and the SEC doesn’t dare, or bother, to tread: the bond and real estate derivative markets where geeks invent impenetrable securities to profit from the misery of lower- and middle-class Americans who can’t pay their debts. The smart people who understood what was or might be happening were paralyzed by hope and fear; in any case, they weren’t talking.

The crucial question is this: Who understood the risk inherent in the assumption of ever-rising real estate prices, a risk compounded daily by the creation of those arcane, artificial securities loosely based on piles of doubtful mortgages? Michael Lewis turns the inquiry on its head to create a fresh, character-driven narrative brimming with indignation and dark humor, a fitting sequel to his #1 best-selling Liar’s Poker. Who got it right? he asks. Who saw the real estate market for the black hole it would become, and eventually made billions of dollars from that perception? And what qualities of character made those few persist when their peers and colleagues dismissed them as Chicken Littles? Out of this handful of unlikely—really unlikely—heroes, Lewis fashions a story as compelling and unusual as any of his earlier bestsellers, proving yet again that he is the finest and funniest chronicler of our times.

Product Description

Get massive exposure for your book, no special computer skills needed — trade published or self published, fiction or nonfiction

Discover why authors fail with paid advertising, pay-per-click, fee-based reviews, and “bestseller” campaigns

Blog to connect with readers, driving them to Amazon and bookstores

Boost your visibility with Google, use MySpace for viral marketing

Ignite word of mouth with Web social networks

Capitalize on peer content and “amateur” book reviews

Here’s what the experts say about this book:

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– Jane Corn, Amazon.com Top Reviewer

“I spent two years building up skills to market my books Earthcore and Ancestor online, and I can tell you right now that Plug Your Book would have saved me MONTHS of time. I bought this book just to make sure I wasn’t missing anything, but it blew me away.”

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“…The one book every author needs to read. I don’t care if you’re writing a computer book, a science fiction novel or the next great self-help guide, you need to get copy of Steve Weber’s Plug Your Book!”

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“I’ve worked with most of America’s largest book publishers, helping many of them build online marketing departments. I’ve worked for authors too. Plug Your Book is the new training manual.”

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“…Plug Your Book reveals the most effective and least expensive tools to promote your titles and to increase your exposure. It’s the best book on online marketing I have ever read, and I read quite a few in the course of my consulting practice with small presses.”

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Here’s what’s inside the book:

… Taking control of your book sales; Electric word of mouth; Amazon’s `long tail;’ Personalized bookstores; Book recommendation effectiveness

… Amazon Bestseller Campaigns; How Bestseller Campaigns work; Haywired recommendations

… Amateur book reviews; Credibility through peers; Amazon Top Reviewers; Negative reviews; Posting trade reviews on Amazon; Fee-based book reviews

… Building your author Web site; A survey of author Web sites; Your online press kit; Multimedia for books; Podcasting for publicity; When to launch your site

… Blogging for authors; Connecting with readers; Blog comments: pros and cons; Blogging categories; Over the long haul; Blog-to-e-mail service

… Social networking; MySpace: Not just for kids; Facebook; Create your own group; Other places on MySpace; More social-networking sites

… Tag – You’re it!; Personal book tagging; Amazon tags; Amazon Media Library; LibraryThing; Tag-based marketing

… Advanced Amazon tools; Buy X, Get Y; Free paired placement; Single New Product e-mails; Amazon Connect; Listmania; So You’d Like to . . . guides; Search Inside the Book; Statistically Improbable Phrases; Writing book reviews; Amapedia; Customer discussions; BookSurge; Your Amazon profile

Product Description
A pocket compendium of food wisdom-from the author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food

Michael Pollan, our nation’s most trusted resource for food-related issues, offers this indispensible guide for anyone concerned about health and food. Simple, sensible, and easy to use, Food Rules is a set of memorable rules for eating wisely, many drawn from a variety of ethnic or cultural traditions. Whether at the supermarket or an all-you-can-eat-buffet, this handy, pocket-size resource is the perfect guide for anyone who would like to become more mindful of the food we eat.

About the Author
Michael Pollan is the author of five previous books, including In Defense of Food, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and The Botany of Desire. A longtime contributor to The New York Times, he is the Knight Professor of Journalism at the University of California Berkeley.