Virtual Tibet
Searching for Shangri-La from the Himalayas to Hollywood
By Orville Schell
(Holt Paperbacks, Paperback, 9780805043822, 352pp.)
Publication Date: May 2001
Other Editions of This Title: Hardcover
Categories: Asia - Tibet, Film & Video - History & Criticism
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What has made remote, mountainous Tibet and its only real celebrity, the Dalai Lama, so abidingly fascinating to the West? In Virtual Tibet, Orville Schell, one of the preeminent experts on modern China and Tibet, undertakes a strange and wondrous odyssey into our Tibetan fantasies. He recounts the spellbinding adventures of the Western explorers and spiritualists who for centuries were bent on reaching forbidden Tibet and the holy city of Lhasa. Simultaneously, Schell embarks on a parallel present-day journey from Beastie Boys' "Free Tibet" concerts to a re-creation of Lhasa in the high Argentine Andes -- the extravagant set of Seven Years in Tibet, starring Brad Pitt.
At once comic and insightful, Virtual Tibet takes us beyond the fantasies to the reality of an isolated country that has repeatedly won the West's adoration, and paid the price for believing that our allegiance is profound.
Orville Schell, Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism, University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Mandate of Heaven, Discos and Democracy, The China Reader, and twelve other books. His articles have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and Newsweek, among others. He lives with his wife and children in the San Francisco Bay Area.
"Fascinating and well-written . . . does much to clarify the disputed history of Tibet and all that has befallen it (including Hollywood)." --Peter Matthiessen
". . . What he has done . . . is to peer deeply into the Tibet fantasies of Hollywood groupies, baseball-cap mantras, and . . . films." --Jonathan Mirsky, The New York Times Book Review
"Schell's chronicle . . . nimbly separates fact from fiction. The result is a compassionate and comic exploration of our 'virtual' era." --The New Yorker
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