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Ed Douglas

Himalaya: A Human History Hardcover – January 5, 2021

by Ed Douglas (Author)

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A magisterial history of the Himalaya: an epic story of peoples, cultures, and adventures among the world’s highest mountains.

For centuries, the unique and astonishing geography of the Himalaya has attracted those in search of spiritual and literal elevation: pilgrims, adventurers, and mountaineers seeking to test themselves among the world’s most spectacular and challenging peaks. But far from being wild and barren, the Himalaya has been home to a diversity of indigenous and local cultures, a crucible of world religions, a crossroads for trade, and a meeting point and conflict zone for empires past and present. In this landmark work, nearly two decades in the making, Ed Douglas makes a thrilling case for the Himalaya’s importance in global history and offers a soaring account of life at the "roof of the world."

Spanning millennia, from the earliest inhabitants to the present conflicts over Tibet and Everest, Himalaya explores history, culture, climate, geography, and politics. Douglas profiles the great kings of Kathmandu and Nepal; he describes the architects who built the towering white Stupas that distinguish Himalayan architecture; and he traces the flourishing evolution of Hinduism, Islam, and Buddhism that brought Himalayan spirituality to the world. He also depicts with great drama the story of how the East India Company grappled for dominance with China’s emperors, how India fought Mao’s Communists, and how mass tourism and ecological transformation are obscuring the bloody legacy of the Cold War.

Himalaya is history written on the grandest yet also the most human scale―encompassing geology and genetics, botany and art, and bursting with stories of courage and resourcefulness.

16 pages of illustrations, 4 color photographs

Print length

592 pages
Language

English
Publisher

W. W. Norton & Company
Publication date

January 5, 2021
Dimensions

6.5 x 1.6 x 9.6 inches
ISBN-10

0393541991
ISBN-13

978-0393541991
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From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

Review

"[Himalaya]is the fruit of an enormous amount of research. . . [Douglas’s] observations are sharp, and in many passages, his writing glows."
― Jeffrey Gettleman, New York Times Book Review

"[An] ambitious, learned account….Douglas portrays a complex, populated landscape and an intricate patchwork of cultures. …His book seeks to reclaim humans from geography, and to recapture the lived experience of the Himalaya."
― Akash Kapur, New Yorker

"The candor of Douglas’s telling shows us that in the Western mind Utopias were “simply orientalist fantasies projected on Himalaya.” His gripping storytelling achieves a summit at a vista overlooking the Himalayas in words that no photo could conjure."
― Christopher King, Air Mail

"Douglas has achieved something more valuable than describe current events: he has examined the ancient origins of those events with a scholarly yet entertaining synthesis of hundreds of years of history."
― Victor Mallet, Financial Times

"An extraordinarily rich and wide investigation into the exhilarating story of the Himalaya. Ed Douglas knows this story in his bones, from his travels and a wonderful range of scholarship, which leaves him perfectly placed to fill a huge gap in our view of how the world fits together."
― Michael Pye, author of The Edge of the World

From the Back Cover

The Himalaya are shrouded in their stories, like monsoon clouds: stories of secret knowledge and new horizons, about somewhere at the end of things, somewhere beyond. These myths hardly ever recognised the complexity and richness of the cultures that developed there over millennia, as varied as the mountains that shaped them. Those cultures were either ignored or appropriated by outsiders looking to profit. That tension, between myth and reality, still tears at the Himalaya today.
―From Chapter 1

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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ W. W. Norton & Company (January 5, 2021)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 592 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0393541991
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0393541991
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.1 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.5 x 1.6 x 9.6 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #143,674 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #42 in Mountain Ecology
- #54 in Buddhist History (Books)
- #78 in India History

Customer Reviews:
237 ratings

About the author

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Ed Douglas

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Ed Douglas, 55, is an award-winning journalist and author of thirteen books about mountains and their people, including the first full-length biography of Tenzing Norgay, who climbed Everest with Sir Edmund Hillary in 1953, published by National Geographic. He covered the Nepali civil war for The Observer and National Geographic, has interviewed the Dalai Lama for The Guardian and made over forty visits to the Himalaya, including a dozen mountaineering expeditions. He is a regular contributor to radio and television and was a consultant on the recent BAFTA-nominated film Sherpa. A contributor to The Guardian for thirty years he writes a column for the paper’s Country Diary. He lives in Sheffield with his wife Kate, a science editor.

Customer reviews

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2 star		5%
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Top reviews from the United States

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Warm in Mexico

Ed Douglas has earned his stripes

Reviewed in the United States on January 18, 2021

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For those who expect a climbing book, they may well be disappointed. The Himalayas represent far more than a synonym for climbing adventures stories. Of those, there are plenty. However, for those who read and thoroughly enjoyed his seminal work on Tensing Norgay, Douglas presents the Himalayas and the cultures who people them, with an equally intellectual scale, tackling the history of one of the last frontiers on the planet. Time, distance and language are all barriers for modern people, hoping to find some lost significance modern life lacks, by organizing the past, searching for new lessons within the contexts of the old. Douglas provides a lot of good context, for even newbies to Tibet and its environs.

By intertwining his personal journeys with geological and geographical information allows a reader to observe, (seemingly in real time), the Himalayas rise from its origins on the sea floor. Reminiscent of Peter Matthiessen in his intimate epic, The Snow Leopard, the whorl and mysteries of Tibet unfold under Douglas' creative cartography. Explorers come in all shapes an sizes and Douglas earned his stripes as a historian (he did that in Tensing). His vista is much, much wider here.

18 people found this helpful

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A Mountain too High

Reviewed in the United States on March 15, 2021

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My book club chose Ed Douglas’ book for our April selection. I and most members of the club were very disappointed, and we elected to call an audible to switch books. The book is dry and way too academic in its writing style. To be sure it could have been interesting given that the Himalayas stand at the crossroads of three major religions: Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. They also stand amidst the geopolitical rivalry involving China, India, and Pakistan.

The problem here is that Douglas gets way to wrapped up in socio-political history going back a thousand years where he highlights the rivalry of the various tribes in the region. With all of the names he mentioned the reader would need a scorecard which he does not provide. As a result, unless the reader is really interested in a very deep history of the region, I would pass.

5 people found this helpful

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Dr. Kent C. Condie

Very boring book

Reviewed in the United States on March 17, 2021

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This is by far one of the most boring books I have every read. The author goes into a way too much detail for most readers, especially in the first half of the book. In a book like this, only the important people in the history of this part of Asia need to be named and discussed: anyone who only appears in one or two sentences doesn’t need to be included. If the author wants to make this information available to the very few who might be interested, it should be placed in an appendix. The length of the book could easily be decreased by half. I managed to skim-read most of the book, only reading in detail the last quarter of the book, which was well done, with about the right amount of detail. I don’t recommend this book to anyone except maybe those specialists in historiography.

4 people found this helpful

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PD1

Wonderful history of the Himalayan region

Reviewed in the United States on June 22, 2021

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For those with a serious interest in the Himalayas this is a very enjoyable and informative book. The author has traveled through the whole area; has climbed the mountains of Nepal and driven across the endless Tibetan plateau and his love of the landscape and its history comes through. I found it a true joy to read. But for those without serious interest in the area, the details of Tibetan religious politics or conflicts among hill tribes must seem mind numbing.
Much of what you would expect about a general, non-academic book on the Himalayas is covered. Geology of its formation, the geography, the climate, and the fauna and flora, the peoples and their genetics (there is an interesting few pages on Denisovian genes present in Tibetans) and of course the history of the politics and the religions is covered well. Western interest and involvement in the region--from the commercial interest of the East India Company, the concerns of the British Empire, and the fascination of the scholars, the botanists, the linguists and the unfortunates who feel the need to climb every mountain they see is also covered well.
Tibetan history is covered in detail, including Buddhist history. (the close links between Mongol rulers of China, and the lineage of the Dalai Lamas may surprise some.) Nepali history is also covered well. Things not known about by the average student such as the Guge kingdom of Western Tibet, and its links to Ladakh are written about well. What is not covered is Kashmir with its history dominated by Central Asians and Moslems. No doubt Kashmir, the Hindu Kush and the Karakoram could have a whole book written about them, with their common history.
The book is based entirely on secondary sources and the author's travels and personal knowledge. The author is a journalist who brings a practiced journalistic, sometimes poetic eye to the proceedings> It breaks no new ground, but nevertheless should be in every library with a section on the Himalayas.

2 people found this helpful

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APM

Dull and Obscure

Reviewed in the United States on February 24, 2021

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A very scholarly, very dense, unreadable door stop featuring tangled syntax and endless descriptions of Tibetan and Himalayan deities, historical figures, and political events. After 20 pages I started skipping through, sure there had to be something to hold my interest. Other than the photos and maps, there was nothing, all the way to the end. Chapter after chapter started with some personal, real-life story, only to devolve into stories of palace bureaucracy and tribal intrigues. The author was there to climb Shivling (a mountain), but if he ever did I missed it. And I never saw so many dependent clauses and prepositionary phrases in my life. Was this translated from German?

3 people found this helpful

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Adrian

An ultimate travelogue about Himalaya

Reviewed in the United States on February 14, 2021

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This amazing book had received enough public reviews to need any further. I am grateful to find this book and, through its pages, to travel, both in time and space, to one of the beautiful corners of our world. Instead I would turn my attention to the author, and to his stunningly detailed description of the history, people and meanings of a place that is only accessible to a few from our civilized world. The combination of adventure and knowledge, melding together in Ed Douglas’s experience is what strikes me the most. And his ability to synthesize everything to tell the story to the world is what we have to be thankful for.

3 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

John Copeland

A splendid scholarly book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 7, 2020

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A splendid scholarly book, full of information about the topographical development and the explorers, but for the general reader it is all very tiresome and tedious, having far too many details. I had to give up after 50 pages, but the the fault was with me, not having the necessary understanding. I had hoped there would have been more details of the people who lived in a very difficult climate - how the monks lived, for example, but there were no such detials. I obviously bought the wrong book.

8 people found this helpful

Mike

Excellent historical account of the Himalaya

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 9, 2020

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The sweep and detail of this book are impressive, and must have involved a prodigious amount of research. It's a little dry at times, but if there's anything you wanted to know about the Himalaya region, its history and its people, then it's surely to be found here in this book.

There are a good many photographs of people associated with the Himalaya, but surprisingly few of the places and mountains themselves, almost to the extent that the Himalaya become the elephant in the room within their own story. One feels that either the author or the publishers wanted to avoid this appearing to be a coffee-table book. But this is a pity, and a lost opportunity. The cover has a stunning photo of the Tiger's Nest Temple in Bhutan, and a few more images like this in the book itself would have immensely improved its appeal and served to remind us why this extraordinary region has had such a unique hold on our imaginations throughout the centuries.

Possibly best regarded as a reference book rather than a cover-to-cover read, but highly recommended nonetheless.

3 people found this helpful

A. D. Lewis

Impressive scholarship

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 17, 2020

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If you are looking for a breezy travelogue to skip through this is not the book for you. It is a detailed, impressively researched work of huge merit. For those happy to go deeply into the history of the Himalaya, the history of those who have lived, loved, worshipped, rankled and traded there, this is a work that is richly absorbing and fascinating. Ed Douglas writes attractively and the whole work has a spirit of clarity and objectivity, rather than tendentious posturing or point scoring. A pleasing purchase, highly recommended.

5 people found this helpful

Malcolm

Well researched and vivid

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 4, 2021

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A compelling read; vast in scope and interest. A book long in the making and studiously written. Perhaps best read as a series of chapters rather than as a full text. Some minor concerns, some chapter titles needed better signposting and accuracy e.g. Chapter on 'Everest diplomacy' is only occasionally about Everest. Re page 419, details on Maurice Wilson might need amended in light of Ed Caesar's recent book on Wilson, see page 66 of this text in particular.

Minor points though - a towering achievement.

2 people found this helpful

MR ANDREW BORLAND

Excellent Book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 14, 2020

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Great book, delivered promptly

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