Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town

 The relentlessly brilliant Barbara Demick delivers another round of knockout reporting. After her illuminating insights into North Korea, she travels to Tibet, specifically the volatile town of Ngaba. Infamous for numerous monks’ self-immolation, Ngaba is the frontline of the resistance against Chinese imperialism. History comes alive through the stories of the people featured. Through Demick’s intrepid work, the reader walks away with a nuanced portrait of a people who have often been portrayed in one-dimensional caricature. A revealing narrative of the slow march of China into Tibet and how Tibetans are balancing the advent of capitalism while preserving their culture. 

Review: Detroit City is the Place to Be by Mark Binelli

When Mark Binelli, a native of Detroit, and general assignment reporter, began work on a book about the city, one of his interview subjects asked him if the book was going to be fiction or non-fiction. "Non," Binelli replied. Binelli writes about the guy's reaction: "He snorted and said, 'No one's gonna believe it.'"

A large portion of Binelli's engaging book, Detroit City is the Place to Be, covers the stuff that "no one's gonna believe." No one, for example, is likely to believe that a once thriving boomtown had gone into such utter and total ruin. Large swathes of empty land, horrendous crime rates, and unemployment – if these issues are bad in urban areas around the country, they are much, much worse in Detroit. "If, once, Detroit had stood for the purest fulfillment of U.S. industry, it now represented America's most epic urban failure, the apotheosis of the new inner-city mayhem sweeping the nation like LSD and unflattering muttonchop sideburns," Binelli writes.

The rest of the review is at BookBrowse.