A gripping portrait of modern Tibet told through the lives of its people from the bestselling
author of Nothing to Envy A brilliantly reported and eye-opening work of narrative
nonfiction.”—The New York Times Book Review NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Parul
Sehgal The New York Times • The New York Times Book Review • The Washington Post • NPR • The
Economist • Outside • Foreign Affairs Just as she did with North Korea award-winning
journalist Barbara Demick explores one of the most hidden corners of the world. She tells the
story of a Tibetan town perched eleven thousand feet above sea level that is one of the most
difficult places in all of China for foreigners to visit. Ngaba was one of the first places
where the Tibetans and the Chinese Communists encountered one another. In the 1930s Mao
Zedong’s Red Army fled into the Tibetan plateau to escape their adversaries in the Chinese
Civil War. By the time the soldiers reached Ngaba they were so hungry that they looted
monasteries and ate religious statues made of flour and butter—to Tibetans it was as if they
were eating the Buddha. Their experiences would make Ngaba one of the engines of Tibetan
resistance for decades to come culminating in shocking acts of self-immolation. Eat the Buddha
spans decades of modern Tibetan and Chinese history as told through the private lives of
Demick’s subjects among them a princess whose family is wiped out during the Cultural
Revolution a young Tibetan nomad who becomes radicalized in the storied monastery of Kirti an
upwardly mobile entrepreneur who falls in love with a Chinese woman a poet and intellectual
who risks everything to voice his resistance and a Tibetan schoolgirl forced to choose at an
early age between her family and the elusive lure of Chinese money. All of them face the same
dilemma: Do they resist the Chinese or do they join them? Do they adhere to Buddhist teachings
of compassion and nonviolence or do they fight? 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. Her depiction is nuanced unvarnished and at times shocking.
