I’ve been spending much of the past two weeks doing what I hope is the final revision of Fei Fei’s Tibet book. After she graduated Princeton in 1999, she received a fellowship to spend a year anywhere in the world doing personal research. She chose Tibet, where she set up a project with the help of doctors of traditional Tibetan medicine to test the effectiveness of that medicine using western research techniques.

Her year in Tibet was fabulous. She spent considerable time living in villages and in nomads’ tents where she got to know the people and their history, religion, and customs very well. She learned a lot about Tibet’s evolving relationship between its traditional culture, the intrusive Chinese government, and the powerful influence of western culture. She kept extensive notes that entire year, and after she returned she began revising them into a coherent narrative. Now I am doing all the editing and, should I be able to actually finish that task this summer, I will compose a chapter-and-outline to send to prospective publishers in the fall.