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Jamyang Norbu has taken the stories of 'forgotten' Tibetans--resistance fighters, secret agents, soldiers, peasants, merchants, even street beggars--and skillfully worked their myriad accounts into a single glorious 'memory history' of the Tibetan struggle. He uses recollections from his own childhood to ease the reader into an immersive understanding of the complexity of Tibet's modern history: the Chinese invasion, the uprisings in Kham and Amdo, the formation of the Four Rivers Six Ranges Resistance Force, the March '59 Lhasa Uprising, the CIA supported Air Operations, the Nyemo peasant Uprising of 68/69 and the Mustang Guerilla Force in northern Nepal, where Norbu later served. He writes of leaving home to drive tractors at refugee settlements, educate refugee children, produce plays at the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts, and collect intelligence for the Tibetan Office of Research and Analysis (TORA) and for France's External Intelligence Agency (SDECE). He uses these anecdotes not so much as autobiography but as a framing device to recount the lives, deeds and, too often, tragedies of the many Tibetans he encountered and befriended throughout his life--nearly all of whom played vital roles in shaping the recent history of their country but whose contributions are still unsung and forgotten. Jamyang Norbu's lifelong commitment to collecting and orchestrating the 'echoes' of these many forgotten voices from the past has resulted in a lyrical, learned and compassionate book that could well be described as the prose epic of the Tibetan freedom struggle. Echoes from Forgotten Mountains: Tibet in War and Peace, Jamyang Norbu, India Viking, Hardcover, 962 pages, $40.00
Novelist, historian, playwright and polemecist, Jamyang Norbu is known as one of the leading exile Tibetan writers at work today, principally on account of his numerous essays on Tibetan politics, history and culture appearing regularly on his blog and other websites, and in such books as Illusion & Reality, Buying the Dragon's Teeth, Shadow Tibet and Don't Stop the Revolution.
Although he has been denounced by the People's Daily (Beijing) as '...the radical Tibetan separatist' and condemned by the exile Tibetan leadership for his critical writings on the Dalai Lama's policies, Norbu is one of the few exile writers read inside Tibet and even in China, where translations of his essays have appeared on various websites. The Beijing based Tibetan poet and blogger, Tsering Woeser, has described him as the 'Lu Xun of Tibet'.
His novel The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes won the Crossword Book Award ('India's Booker') in 2000, and has been translated into a dozen languages. Norbu was a member of the Tibetan resistance force in Mustang, on the Nepal-Tibet frontier in the early 70s. He currently lives in New York City with his wife and two daughters.
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