The Himalaya

David Zurick is one of the world's foremost scholars and writers of the Himalaya, an expansive region that is defined by China to the north, India to the south, Afghanistan and Pakistan to the west, and Nepal and Bhutan to the east. It is also home to Earth's greatest mountain range, including K2 and Mount Everest. For more than thirty-five years, Zurick has explored, studied, and written about the Himalaya. In this, his third book on the region, he provides a richly rewarding guide to its physical features, its myriad cultures, and the impact that urbanization, climate change, and tourism hold for the region's future. Each essay represents Zurick's own encounters with the Himalaya: from Kathmandu, the capital city of Nepal, where the Buddhists and Hindu worlds of Asia converge, to the geological structures and sixty-million-year-old tectonic history of its mountains; from the traditional life of small villages, where Zurick participated in the world of farmers who live in accordance with the natural contours of the mountains, to life in the alpine zone, home to the majority of the fifty million people who live in the Himalaya; from economic and social change in Bhutan, a Buddhist kingdom, to the fragile frontier of Tibet, a fabled land of antiquity now governed by determined Chinese. Taken together, the essays and galleries of photographs convey an emerging picture of a region impacted by the inroads of modernity, environmental change, and shifting cultural identities. Though the essays roam widely across the region, we gain a comprehensive vision of what it is like to explore and learn about this most unique place on Earth: the Himalaya. --Book Jacket.