Josh Philip Ross

Benjamin Hoff, The Tao of Pooh (1982) and The Te of Piglet (1992)

In college, I had a minor romantic entanglement with a hippie who changed my life by giving me a copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, putting me on a Green Tortoise bus (she was eager to get me the hell out of Eugene, Oregon, where I was moping about because she had a new boyfriend when I came to visit), and telling me to look into Taoism. So I took a class on Eastern religion and read the Tao Te Ching, and I went to a couple of meetings of a campus group of Korean Taoists who all wore suits and ties and instructed me to chant until I could raise water from a bowl placed in front of me, but mostly I read Benjamin Hoff like everyone else.

Rereading him now, I’m embarrassed that I ever took him seriously, though I can see what must have been appealing. College was, for me, pretty overwhelming. Going from a mediocre California high school to Columbia University, I was faced with the reality that I was not so smart or special as I had thought, and that there were a great many people who knew a great deal more than me about a great many things. The workloads were daunting, the reading difficult. And then along came a book telling me that the scholars were actually full of it, and that lying stoned on the floor was perhaps the profounder wisdom. I liked that.

The Tao of Pooh and The Te of Piglet are, in fact, full of straw men, and as much as Hoff hopes to lighten the atmosphere with Winnie-the-Pooh quotes, he comes off as cranky and aggrieved in ways that have become far more familiar in the last couple of decades. His anger about the modern world, about capitalism, about environmental damage, seemed back then to put him on the political left. But he’s also angry at scholars who act as gatekeepers of knowledge, and at feminists who question the neutrality of masculine pronouns and just don’t seem very feminine, positions that have been taken up by the right in today’s culture wars, and that anyway never seemed to have much to do with Taoism.

Indeed, The Tao of Pooh and The Te of Piglet are long on complaints but short on solutions, other than a rather cavalier conclusion that we are facing a “cleansing” crisis that will lead to a new Eden. “Many will find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Hoff says, “because they did not pay enough attention to what the natural world was telling them.” I suppose the Syrians and Ukranians and Chinese Uyghurs should have listened to the trees more.

In spirituality, it’s wise to look to the preacher to assess what’s being preached. Benjamin Hoff seems bitter and acerbic, which is maybe not the best possible recommendation for the spirituality he espouses. It’s also disappointing to discover that your old guru was a fraud, but I guess that puts me in closer touch with the Indian experience of many Westerners.

As for where my own head was at, it seems fittingly nineties to have formulated a spirituality out of slacking, childishness, and despair.

Kill the headlights and put it in neutral.

Lawrence LeShan, The Medium, The Mystic, and The Physicist: Toward a General Theory of the Paranormal (1974)

Lawrence LeShan was a researcher into the paranormal who claimed to practice and teach psychic healing. He seems to have worked in good faith, attempting to maintain a level of scientific scepticism and rigor, although whether he achieve that is open to question. He’s largely forgotten now, but he’s important to me because he was my grandmother Shirley Winston’s Ph.D. mentor and the one who taught her psychic healing, a practice she continued for some years (my father and his mother both attested to her success at it for specific ailments).

Like many before him, LeShan tried to put paranormal rsearch on a sound scientific footing, and like many before him, he seems to have failed. I’ll lay out his theory first, then talk about where it falls short, and lastly how all this is related to my research on India and Nepal and my own travels there.

The theory

LeShan starts by crediting reports and studies that show evidence of clairvoyance — knowledge the medium had but should not have had, either about the future or about some distant situation — and of psychic healing, where recovery from illness was outside the bounds of normal medicine. Assuming that there are enough such reports that these phenomena can be considered real, he proceeds to explain them with a kind of analogy to the theory of relativity in physics.

To start, he explores how clairvoyants and healers describe the experience of doing what they do. This, he shows, is similar to how mystics across time and cultures have described their experiences. They feel a sense of the oneness of all things, of connection to all beings, of abiding love, of timelessness, of there being no right or wrong in the ordinary sense because all is as it should and must be. LeShan decided to take these mystics at their word, and he describes this alternate way of seeing reality as the Clairvoyant Reality. In that reality, paranormal activity should be possible beause time and distance are collapsed and all things are interrelated.

To bolster the case for this Clairvoyant Reality, LeShan turns to modern physics, particularly relativity theory, which posits time as a dimension and the fabric of the universe as a kind of vast field. He demonstrates that the writings of physicists, in attempting to explain this strange new world, are often indistinguishable from the writings of mystics. And if it’s true in physics that time is relative and that all things are connected, then why should it not be true of the Clairvoyant Reality?

The problems

First, LeShan takes it as given that paranormal experiences are real, but this has been notoriously difficult to prove in any consistent way. For now, let’s leave that aside as both the most serious and least interesting deficiency in his theory.

Second, LeShan assumes that what mystics are describing is an external reality, not an internal one. He does raise the possible objection that these are all internal experiences, but dismisses it quickly without exploring it. But unless there’s some other physical evidence to support the existence of what LeShan calls the Clairvoyant Reality (as there is, amply, for the theory of relativity), why not assume that what mystics across time and cultures have experienced is similar because it has a similar biological root in our brain structure?

As for the analogy to physics, it falls flat. The evidence for relativity isn’t our ordinary everyday sense data, in that it’s collected by scientific instruments, but it’s sense data in our ordinary reality, not in some other reality. Nor is it surprising that scientists, struggling to describe the peculiar ways the universe works on scales either too large or too small for ordinary human comprehension, should turn to some preexisting language as metaphor, and the preexisting language for discussing vastnesses beyond ordinary comprehension is that of mystics.

It’s important to remember that this is how physicists talk to lay people about physics. I remember figuring this out in college, when I took Physics for Poets (yes, it was really called that) to meet the science requirement. I was struggling over the whole wave/particle duality with light when I realized that both wave and particle were metaphors drawn from the macro world, and that the best description of what light actually did was neither wave nor particle but a mathematical formula. (The formula is, of course, just another approximation, but a better one.)

I also recall discovering that there is nothing mystical or strange about the notion, in particle physics, that every observation affects what is observed. At a macro level, this is necessarily a kind of mystic metaphor, since we know that there are times when we observe things at a distance without appearing to affect them at all. But in particle physics, this just means that the way you observe something is to bounce something else off of it, which of course sends the observed thing careening in a different direction. It’s like determining a golf ball’s position in flight by hitting it with a basketball. Of course the golf ball changes direction after that! When you look at the moon, you don’t change the number of photons bouncing off of it. When you look at an electron, you do. That’s all it is.

As the Buddha once said, don’t mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself. The metaphor is not the reality.

Why I read LeShan anyway

So if LeShan is just a forgotten, discredited researcher in a forgotten, discredited field, why bother? And what does any of this have to do with my larger project of writing about my travels in India and Nepal?

Whatever drew me to India, it was part of a long cultural association of the East with wisdom, understanding, profundity. And that cultural association is complexly tangled up with Western ideas of the occult, the paranormal, the uncanny, and the other. The Theosophical, Gurdjieffian mysticism that leads down to people like Tim Leary and Ram Dass isn’t really seperate from the Theosophical, William Jamesian, Jungian plumbing of the mystic depths. LeShan calls on Indian mystics for support, and in his turn shows up in a footnote in Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard, about his spiritual quest in the Nepal Himalaya.

At the time I hatched the whole scheme to go to India, I hadn’t read either Matthiessen or LeShan, but I was living with my grandparents, sleeping in the room that had been my grandmother’s psychology office. Ram Dass’s Remember, Be Here Now was on the bookshelf, though I hadn’t read that either (I was too busy being elsewhere soon). Somehow these influences seem to have trickled into me. I didn’t go to India on any overt spiritual quest — no visits to ashrams, no temple stays — but I had a spiritual yearning, and some level of credulity, or at least of openness to the idea that there are many things we don’t understand.

As for my grandmother, we have tended, after her passing, to regard her as a sort of Yoda, full of deep wisdom and great power. But that’s not quite honest, is it? She was a muddled up human like the rest of us, highly intelligent but at times credulous, at times querulous.

Still, her healings seemed to work, and her uncanny presence recurs in surprising ways over the course of my life — ways that have something of the flavor of LeShan’s Clairvoyant Reality, outside of the normal flow of time.

But for that, perhaps wait for the book I’m writing. There’s much yet to unravel.

Gita Mehta, Karma Cola: Marketing the Mystic East (1979)

By the late seventies, the image of Westerners in floppy shirts traipsing after Indian gurus was already a cliche, with Hare Krishnas in airports and Stevie Wonder declaring that Transcendental Meditation gives you peace of mind (in a song called, of all things, “Jesus Children of America”). It was to this peculiar state of affairs — the West, long seen by Indians as the seat of sophistication and the model of development, now turning to the East for wisdom — that Gita Mehta turned her eye, delivering a slim but devastating volume that sends up, gently and sympathetically but relentlessly, the credulous Westerners and the gurus who prey on them.

This theme of West meeting East is one that Pico Iyer would pick up a few years later, more fully and incisively, in Video Night in Kathmandu, but Mehta deserves some credit for getting there first, just a year after Edward Said’s Orientalism (and Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard, that paean to the mystic power of the Himalayas and the plausibility of yetis). But Mehta has none of Said’s rage and none of his showy erudition. She shows great compassion for the lost souls washing up on her shores, and also a clever understanding of how strange it is for ordinary Indians (or at least ordinary educated Indians) to adjust to the notion that they, and not the West, have Got It Right.

There’s a lot in this book that’s very, very good, though at times her circumspect, elliptical style can become a liability. Nothing is footnoted, and one wishes that references to “an Indian writer” and the like were less cryptic. There’s in irony in a book like this asking us to take so much on faith. Still, it captures a flavor of absurdity that was familiar enough both from my upbringing in the Marin of the seventies and eighties and my own travels in India. (I remember an older woman, after telling me she and her husband had just come from the Osho asharm in Pune, looking me intently in the eye, sliding a hand along my thigh, and declaring, “You should go. It’s amaaaazing!”)

It took me a while to realize that I had read this book before, twenty-five years ago, on my first trip to India. Bits and pieces seemed familiar, and then I came to the part about Goa. I remembered the image of the naked Brazilian man with the silver fluete being pimped out at the Anjuna Flea Market, which I attended and found to be dustier but not more impressive than the Guerneville Flea Market in Sonoma, which is not very impressive. There was no naked floutist.

Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard (1978)

In a delicious irony, the book that has been “the inspiration for more hippy trails and backpacker expeditions to Kathmandu and beyond than any other volume,” was written by a CIA agent. The Snow Leopard is the tale of a trek into the Dolpo region to look for Himalayan black sheep and, yes, snow leopars (spoiler alert: no snow leopards), and it’s also the story of a man trying to center himself after the death of his wife. His journey is a time of reflection colored by his devotion to Zen Buddhism.

It’s the mysticism that set this book apart — not a hippie mysticism, but a very New York Review sort of mysticism (or maybe I should say Paris Review, since that’s the journal Matthiessen founded alongside George Plimpton, apparently as cover for his CIA work, or New Yorker, since that’s where a shorter version was first published, but then you have to remember it was the William Shawn New Yorker, not the post-Tina Brown New Yorker). The footnotes are a who’s who of erudite occultism for the credulous highbrow: D.T. Suzuki, Chogyam Trungpa, Mircea Eliade, the German monk Angarika Govinda (The Way of the White Clouds), fabulist Carlos Castaneda, the Theosophists Alexandra David-Neel and Helena Blavatsky, the Theosophist hanger-on Walter Evans-Wentz. Most surprising of all was a quote from Lawrence LeShan, an ESP researcher and psychic healer who was also my grandmother’s mentor when she got her Ph.D. in parapsychology.

Small world.

The Snow Leopard is a curious choice for a hippie favorite, with its detailed natural description — including, alas, a very scientifish disquisition on evidence for yeti — and focus on the hardships of the journey, it harks back to an older style of travel writing that has gone out of style. There’s introspection aplenty, but very little that you could call post-colonial, and Matthiessen’s attitude toward the natives he travels with has more than a whiff of paternalism, though one ought to admire his honesty in depicting himself being churlish and shitty towards the porters and sherpas. There’s a jarring moment when he describes his trek as consisting of two people, meaning of course two white people and a large group of Nepalis.

For my work, the most important thing this book did was point me towards LeShan. For the rest of it, it didn’t move me. Some of it is beautifully written, but at times it sounds like a parody of George Plimpton diction, or a twelve-page Updike essay on pigeon feathers in the New York Review. There are some fine descriptions of the mountains and villages in an area not far from where I trekked, but the feel of the book is never quite right, never quite in tune with the Nepal I remember or have read about in so many other books. I suppose it’s the very headiness that’s off. For all its towering peaks and its temples climbing skyward, Nepal is an earthy place, rough and funky. Matthiessen seems to have missed its delightful goofiness.

Earthman, Eight Finger Eddie: The Hippie History of Goa and Kathmandu (2015)

This is a terrible book. I mean, really terrible. Written by someone who calls himself Earthman and self-published on Amazon for a buck ninety-nine (I mock, but is it where I end up?), Eight Finger Eddie is a sloppy mess of a book that attempts to tell the life story of Yetward Mazamanian, a local hippie hero known as Eight-Finger Eddie (he was born with just eight fingers) who was one of the first freaks to settle in Goa, and who, by virtue of being a couple of decades older than everyone else and pretty chill, turned into a kind of father figure to a lot of the lost, confused hippies who wandered in. (Earthman was one of them.)

The terribleness of this book is not just in its poor editing, its endless repetitions and recaps, or its lack of research — Earthman seems to have relied entirely on Eddie’s recollections, without checking anything — but in the adolescent, retrograde attitudes of its author, who seems never to have outgrown the viewpoints of the stoned kid he was when he first visited Goa in the early seventies.

But that’s what makes this book so useful.

I remember Goa as the one place in India that still felt colonized. The Westerners treated it like their own, and they treated the Indians as a nuisance to be dealt with. The locals don’t like nudity? Fuck ’em. The locals want to build a resort? How dare they ruin my dirt cheap paradise for their own financial gain!

Over the course of this book, Earthman manages to engage in an astonishing range of colonialist hippie cliches. He describes women as “luscious” again and again. When Eddie’s white girlfriend has engaged in a threesome with a couple of Mexican villagers, Earthman declares that the two of them “have made contact with the natives — way beyond National Geographic!” He goes into a tizzy when he feels Eddie’s wild experiences have trumped his own freakiness. He declares himself “deeply fascinated by India” and thinks there’s “pure village life” out there, but never makes any particular effort to engage with it beyond hippie hangouts in Goa.

At one point, bitching about Panjim’s big city ways, Earthman takes a leak on some public shrubbery, without grasping that this is what the hippies have been doing to Goa for decades. The pristine beaches they found back in 1971 weren’t pristine anymore once they had hippies camping, pissing, and shitting all over them. It never seems to occur to him that the tourist development of Goa he so despises — the charter flights, the resorts, the cops hassling the druggies — might be a boon to the Goans, whose state boasts some of the highest income and social indicators in India.

And these selfsame Goans, whose tolerance gets mentioned a lot, may have reasonably become exhausted with the insanity the hippies brought. It takes Earthman a long time to get to it, but his story finally winds around to Goa in the seventies, and to the various hippie houses Eddie led. They were places where people could, and did, go totally insane. Jumping down wells in fits of pique seems to have been a common behavior. Bursts of violence were not unusual. And then, when the wells began to run dry as the hot season approached (never would Earthman wonder who used up all the water), the hippies split, heading for Kathmandu while the locals had to go on living on their meager wages in Goa.

I remember that atmosphere of impending violence in Goa, something I felt nowhere else in India or Nepal. I thought it was because it was late in the season, with only the most exhausted burnout cases still hanging around. Or maybe, I thought, it was because so many people were waiting for the start of a party that had ended years earlier. But maybe that was just what Goa was about: the place the crazies went, and only the crazies stayed, because it was crazy — a kind of permanent colony for the Acid Test crowd. I grew up in the aftermath of the great hippie dream, and I saw many sides of it, good and bad — macrame and Volvos at the food co-op, lots of stoned parents, barefoot kids running around Point Reyes Station, crystal shops and bearded mystics, people trying to convince me carob was the same thing as chocolate — and Goa seemed to be the worst of the worst. And Earthman, in his obliviousness, has done much to confirm my impressions.

Sharif Gemie and Brian Ireland, The Hippie Trail: A History (2017)

This is an odd little book. It appears to be the first attempt to write the history of what was known as the Hippie Trail, or the Hashish Trail: the overland route from Europe to India that began around 1957 and ended in 1978. (The boundaries are set, at the beginning, by the first overland coach service from England, at first used mostly by Indian nationals, and also the publication of Kerouac’s On The Road, and at the end by the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.)

Part of what’s so odd is that this is the first, and as far as I can tell, the only history of a phenomenon that swept up hundreds of thousands of travelers, made its way into popular songs by everyone from Janis Joplin to Bob Seger to Rush, was covered extensively and often luridly in the press, yet seems never to have generated any professionally written books at all beyond a couple of sensationalistic novels. The countless memoirs produced by travelers have been largely self-published or circulated in manuscript. This is all the stranger when you consider the success of so much adjacent writing: Gita Mehta’s Karma Cola, which picks apart the hippie guru culture of Western travelers to India in the seventies; Pico Iyer’s Video Night in Kathmandu from a few years later looking at how Western culture has come to pervade the East; or even Remember, Be Here Now, Ram Dass’s personal story of spiritual transformation in Nepal and India.

Gemie and Sharif make an honorable if not quite comprehensive effort, having found eighty-eight Hippie Trail travelers to interview, as well as having slogged through a mountain of poorly written, poorly edited memoirs. There are times when their efforts feel a little amateurish, but I suppose that’s to be expected from scholars wading into territory no one else has bothered with. This is not the kind of book anyone should read who doesn’t have a personal or academic interest in the Hippie Trail, but it makes a decent case that more people should have the latter.

From my perspective, I most wanted to understand how and why travelers came to choose this route, this destination. In delving into it, Gemie and Ireland find that a search for drugs or a spiritual quest were the most common reasons given, when the reason was anything more articulate than just a vague quest for adventure or the exotic. But why India for all that? Indeed, it seems that in the early days, Morocco played much the same role for drugs and exotic adventure, but not for the spiritual quests as much. I suppose it may be asking too much of this book to look for the deeper roots of the fascination with India, and I have others for that.

Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia (2006)

Once upon a time, a woman got a divorce, got into and out of a bad relationship, and then went on vacation for a year to get over it all. The resulting book, Eat, Pray, Love, became a massive bestseller (and the most popular travel book ever about India, which is why I read it), and the author got to be played by Julia Roberts in the movie (called Eat Pray Love, discarding both commas and context).

So why is this book so popular? Well, because it’s the perfect airport book.

First of all, there’s it’s shape and style. It’s long enough to keep you occupied but never difficult linguistically, structurally, or morally. Divided into three sections that are mapped out right there in the title, then chopped into 36 chapters each (for a mystical total of 108), it offers bites you can finish while you wait for the drink cart to get out of the way of the bathroom. The voice is punchy and familiar from Nora Ephron characters and especially Sex and the City, and there are lots of easy metaphors and pop culture references (something gets compared to the last helicopter out of Saigon).

Second, it’s sort of a travel book, so you feel justified in reading it on holiday, but there are no complex itineraries or deep dives into bloody history or vexing social issues, so you never feel pressured to do more, feel more, or understand more than you were already going to. The story remains firmly in the tourist point of view, and Gilbert is so winningly self-deprecating that you might not notice how she’s never quite self-critical. Everything is someone else’s fault, or no one’s really, and there are no problems in the world that Liz Gilbert can’t solve with pluck and gumption, because Liz Gilbert never engages with any problems that aren’t Liz Gilbert-sized ones. If you felt a little queasy about your holiday in other people’s misery, Gilbert spends 500 pages encouraging you not to notice. You have bigger fish to fry. You have to look inward if you want to save the world.

And you do want to save the world, don’t you? Gilbert does — and that, more than anything, is my biggest disappointment with this book.

At the start, Gilbert discovers, to her horror, that she doesn’t want to be married anymore, and eventually she works up the courage to get out. Then she gets into a bad relationship and has to find her way out of that. At last she decides that she’ll spend a year traveling, first to Italy, then to an ashram in India, and finally to Bali. There’s the possibility of a kind of feminist, humanist awakening here, a willingness to live for one’s own pleasure and joy, and for a while, living in Rome, that seems to be where Gilbert is headed. But there’s an undercurrent of self-doubt, and soon enough she’s on to the ashram for a spiritual cleanse, because too much fun is no good at all.

I had been looking forward to the India section of the book — that’s where my interest mainly lies — but alas, Gilbert decides to give up her plans for a wider tour of India and stays in the ashram the whole time. Her unquestioning faith in its benevolence is discomfiting for anyone familiar with the darker side of India’s guru culture, as is her lack of curiosity about the poverty she sees just beyond the gate. Instead, she makes a big drama out of her distaste for a long, boring morning chant, something hard to take too seriously if you had to do davening every morning in Hebrew school.

The climax of all this looking inward is a reconciliation with her husband. Not her actual husband, mind you, but an imagined version of him, who is very forgiving. One might have hoped for recognition that forgiveness from others isn’t required, or that what Gilbert is really doing is learning to forgive herself, but that never arrives. She has been forgiven by her husband’s spiritual presence, and that is that.

And so, newly armed with a vague sort of spiritual awakening, Gilbert arrives in Bali, where she fails to read Pico Iyer just as hard as she failed to read Gita Mehta in India. She goes to Ubud, of course, because that’s where spiritual types go, and she parties with expats, and she goes to bed with a handsome Brazilian. She also befriends a local single mom, and in Bali the big climax comes when Gilbert decides to buy her a house, or at least raise the money for one. In the midst of all this, Gilbert realizes that the woman’s daughter’s name, Tutti, means “everyone” in Italian, and manages to portray this admittedly generous act of white saviorhood as somehow saving the whole world. This whole trip was doing inner work, see — inner work that the Balinese don’t have the resources for but probably don’t need anyway because they’re so picturesque and traditional — and that inner work has allowed Liz Gilbert to become the generous kind of person who sometimes makes an effort. It’s a disappointing conclusion, very Protestant, casting what seems to have been a pleasant period of excursion as a kind of stealth Via Dolorosa. I went to Southeast Asia a few years back, Bali included, and traveled around and had a lovely time saving no one from anything, and that’s quite OK.

But is it bestseller OK? Probably not. For that, you’re better off with a sitcom character like Liz Gilbert, someone who turns every experience into an episode, who overcomes obstacles without ever changing very much, and who winds it all up with a pretty romance.

When I traveled to India as a young man, I was without a doubt a tourist. I pored over Lonely Planet travel guides and used them to plan my itinerary, which included musts such as the Taj Mahal and the Palace of Winds in Jaisalmer. I bought a plane ticket and carried travelers checks and a camera in my rucksack, staying at hotels and eating at cafes where I could meet and hang out with other tourists.

In beginning to write about this experience, which was formative in my life, I began to ask myself why I picked India of all places — what alchemy of cultural signals delivered to my brain this singular thought. But an ancillary question also arose, which is how this entire mode of travel came to be. How did we all learn to venerate beaches and mountains rather than grain fields and power plants? What was the origin of the infrastructure we’ve come to expect — the hotel room with bathroom en suite, the buses, the guidebooks?

Eric G. E. Zuelow has done his best to figure it all out. Though Zuelow starts with a few stabs at ancient tourism — he has a tendency to start chapters with panoramas so sweeping as to become ridiculous — the larger arc is one that all feels pretty familiar if you know your European history, although Zuelow does a fine job of putting it all together in the right context. We begin with the 18th-century Grand Tour for gentlemen, see how Romantic ideas of the sublime alter what’s considered worth seeing and doing, and watch as technology and social change expand tourism down the social ladder. Inventions like steam ships, steam trains, automobiles, and planes are obvious means of widening tourism’s scope, but Zuelow is good at connecting these inventions (and others less obvious, like the bicycle) to social changes such as changing beach culture, working class summer camps, and much more.

This is a hinky book, with many gaps that the author acknowledges, which is the result of a first foray into an understudied field. (One might say that Zuelow has gone off the beaten track, to borrow a tired phrase from the tourism industry.) It’s also full of fascinating stories like the rise of Thomas Cook from a promoter of Scottish tours to a worldwide travel manger or the complicated process of turning train travel from a terror to a luxury. As we get into the period after World War II, we get to see the creation of the sort of family car trip that was, by 1983, so mockable in National Lampoon’s Vacation, and then the shift from that kind of trip to more individual, personal journeys of the sort valorized in Eat Pray Love.

Through it all, Zuelow reminds us just how important tourism is, both economically and culturally. It has now spread from the West to the world, and it’s something nearly everyone aspires to, and nearly everyone who can engages in. We live for our vacations. Considering the huge place tourism has in our lives and societies, it’s a wonder there aren’t more studies like this. One hopes there will be.

John Whelpton, A History of Nepal (2005)

Nepal’s history is complex and fascinating, full of surprising stories, peculiar personalities, and unexpected turns. In A History of Nepal, John Whelpton avoids all that.

Whelpton’s book is a specialist’s book about a nation-state. Environment, prehistory, and everything else through 1753 is done away with in a brief preliminary chapter, and only a little more space is given to the Gorkhali conquests and Rana rule, which lasted until 1951. That’s when the country opened to outsiders, and the remainder of the book reads like a series of UN reports.

Whelpton’s methodology doesn’t help. The period from 1951 tp 1991 is divided into three chapters: domestic politics and foreign relations, economy and environment, and changes in Nepalese society. But of course these things don’t happen in isolation, so we get our picture of modern Nepal in fragments and repetitions, many of them tedious in the extreme. The chapter on politics is exhausting, full of names, parties, and intrigue, but without much in the way of personalities or narratives to help the reader keep track. Or care. In the economy chapter we literally get annual grain yields, and the chapter on social change manages to be highly technical and specific without ever giving a window into anyone’s actual lives. Nepal, in this telling, is a land of politicians and parties, of development projects and economic trends, of demographics and ethnic identities, but not of actual people. Instead, we get sentences like this: “Against this background, Nepal had to negotiate a structural adjustment loan from the World Bank in the mid-1980s, the conditions attached including not only moves towards balancing the budget and reducing the trade deficit but also action on poverty reduction.” It might as well be Bolivia or Burkina Faso.

Whelpton ends with a chapter on democracy and disillusion, having published his book in the unfortunate year of 2005, just before the Maoist insurgency came to an end, the Maoists entered parliament, and the Kingdom of Nepal became a republic.

It’s impressive to write a history of a country so storied and inspiring — home to lamas, Gorkhas, the highest mountains in the world, to rhinos and tigers, to Hindus, to Tantric Buddhists, to adherents of B’on and even older animist traditions, to hippies and freaks and adventurers — and come up with not a single poetic sentence.

Ed Douglas, Himalaya: A Human History (2021)

In the Annapurnas, I was rarely alone. My prior idea of backpacking came from Yosemite, a park mostly closed to human habitation, where the illusion of solitude in unspoiled nature is available even on a short walk along a marked trail to a well maintained campsite. On the Annapurna trail, you’re always close to the nearest village, and even in forest passages or canyons of windswept boulders, you’re apt to be passed by a flock of goats or a train of bell-jingling yaks. The picture of the Himalaya as devoid of human life — one that comes from the expedition literature of the mountaineers who strive for the uninhabitable peaks — is a false one, as is the idea of the Himalaya as a zone of hidden and isolated Shangri-Las.

In Himalaya: A Human History, Ed Douglas puts the focus squarely on the many and diverse peoples who have called the Himalaya region their home for thousands of years. In a history that one feels obligated to call “magisterial,” Douglas tries to break out of the usual focus on Western sahibs and artificial national boundaries, albeit with mixed success. The paucity of indigenous writings and the vast wealth of Western material inevitably tips an English-language writer’s scales, and Douglas is a good enough writer to recognize a good story when he finds one. As for national boundaries, they may be artificial, but their effects on practical reality require somewhat separate tellings of the histories of Nepal, Tibet, and West Bengal (other regions such as Bhutan get less coverage).

Douglas is a fine writer who wears his knowledge lightly. There are sentences and passages so good, I wish they were mine, like this one: “Climbing is hard and unnecessary, a strange luxury.” Or this one: “We instinctively think of mountains as eternal, but they’re not. They are falling to bits and being remade like the rest of nature — like us.” He’s also, as I mentioned, a wonderful miner of stories, and he turns up some extraordinary facts, such as the occultist and Black Sabbath subject Alister Crowley nosing about Darjeeling, or the Nazis getting the swastika not from any Indo-Aryan connection but from the mosaics of Troy, or even that Nepal’s income from tourism as a percentage of GDP is actually lower than the global average, contrary to the impression most visitors get that tourism must be the mainstay of the cash economy. At times this tendency leads into odd byways, such as the long passages on botanists. Not that these aren’t interesting, but the peculiar shifts in focus can make it hard to keep the larger picture in view. There are also moments, though not too many, when the machismo inherent in being a climber and journalist sneaks its way into the writing.

Still, whatever its shortcomings — and some of them are also strengths — Himalaya is an outstanding book that will remain essential to anyone hoping to understand the region and that won’t be surpassed for a generation or more.