Note: This is an encore episode of Reader's Corner. The original episode first aired in January 2021.
Eat The Buddha is a gripping portrait of Tibet, spanning decades of Tibetan and Chinese modern history and told through the lives of its people. Award-winning journalist Barbara Demick explores one of the most hidden corners of the world, telling the story of a Tibetan town eleven thousand feet above sea level.
Illuminating a culture that has long been romanticized by Westerners as deeply spiritual and peaceful, Demick reveals what it is really like to be a Tibetan in the twenty-first century, trying to preserve one’s culture, faith, and language against the depredations of a seemingly unstoppable, technologically all-seeing superpower. Eat the Buddha was named one of the best books of the year by the New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, NPR and The Economist
Barbara Demick is the Beijing bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times. Her reporting on North Korea and coverage of Sarajevo have won numerous awards, including being a Pulitzer Prize finalist for international reporting. Her previous book is Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood.
